A Beautiful Day

    It’s a beautiful day. The sun is out. The blue sky is dotted with cottony white clouds. It’s warm, not hot like it has been for most of the last month and a half. There’s just enough of a breeze to throw off what little heat does try to hamper your enjoyment of this beautiful day.
    This is a day for lying in the grass, and imagining elephants and horses and ships in those white cottony clouds. A wonderfully relaxing and lazy Sunday like this is conducive to allowing your thoughts to wander towards the irreverent, and hence, you daydream. When I was a child I believed that there was another whole world up on those clouds, and that the people lived in castles and rode dragons, and that they would walk to the edge of their cloud and look down at us ants down here on the ground. How fun and exciting that must be to do. Those lucky cloud people. I would lay there in a field near our home for hours trying to see those cloud people staring back down at me, but I never did.
    I wondered why no one else talked about them. After all, the jet planes that streaked through the sky, so very high up leaving new clouds in their wake, surely they must see them. But I never heard about them on TV, and we never talked about them in class. I finally asked my mother and she told me that clouds were like fog and couldn’t hold anything up. I thought that was ridiculous. I could see through fog. Of course it couldn’t bear any weight. But you can’t see through clouds. Obviously they’re thicker. It really made me question my mother’s wisdom and brought into doubt everything she’d ever taught me (in the whole four or five years I‘d been alive that is). So I kept my thoughts about the cloud people to myself.
    Over time I began to doubt that they existed. I should have seen at least one by now. Or glimpsed the tip of one of their castle towers. In school we learned about clouds and I came to realize it wasn’t true. But even still, the first time I ever got a chance to fly, when I was nine or ten, and that big jet plane lifted above the clouds, I had to look out that little window for my castles, not really expecting to see any, just wanting to make sure it had all been my imagination. And they weren’t there, and that four or five year old in me was disappointed.
    Now, I’m almost fifty years old, and have flown many times in my life and have repeatedly verified the nonexistence of those castles. But as I lay here in the soft green grass of my freshly mown yard, and look up to that beautiful blue sky with the white cottony clouds, I still can’t help but wonder how those cloud people can hide themselves and their castles so well.