Clouds

My mother, almost ninety, has always loved beautiful clouds, so on our way to the UC-Davis Alzheimer's Clinic at the beginning of March, I sang her a snatch of the Joni Mitchell song "Both Sides Now."

Bows and flows of angel hair/and ice cream castles in the air/and feathered canyons everywhere--I've looked at clouds that way.

I didn't sing the "disenchanted" rest.

Mom knew where we were going and why, so I think her very great concentration on the shapes of beautiful clouds was to buoy her own spirits.  We did it together.

When she had to move from her home of forty-five years to a shared room at Aegis, I made her a cloud collage, which she hid because she thought the other resident would feel sad because their families didn't give them things like that.   Their moms and dads didn't even visit them.

I wanted to hug my mother to death, but I didn't.  I even went through with a planned trip to Germany to see a friend in Bremen.  But everywhere I went I took pictures with clouds.  All my pictures of the monuments in Berlin show cloudy skies, but not the kind of cloudy skies that require a silver lining.  I think back in fourth or fifth grade we learned the names for the different types of clouds.  I can't remember them now.  But here they are illustrated.