Oddly Shaped

Oddly shaped clouds: a sky watcher’s feast.

“One day you may notice a chip on a vase or an oddly shaped cloud /or a car parked at the end of a shadowy lane, / but what I noticed that summer day from a reading chair on the small front porch / was a sparrow who appeared out of nowhere, / as birds often do, then vanished / into the leafy interior of the fallen limb / as if it were still growing from the tree, / budding and burgeoning like all the days before.” — Billy Collins, “The Night of the Fallen Limb,” The Rain in Portugal.

The poem, from which I’ve shared a sentence with you, and this cloud image came back to me today, so I figured it was time to couple them. Just the phrase, “an oddly shaped cloud,” caught my eye, and thus I ambled toward the image I snapped a few years ago on a summer afternoon like this one. Gentle, quiet, kindly—here, at least—a time when one can notice things, I noticed that I have been noticing more details lately, more than usual. Things like the thin line of calcium around the bathroom faucet, the dandelion seed puffs on the patio screen, the sound of the fan in the other room, the absence of orange blossoms on the orange tree, the sparrows among the weeds were easily overlooked—before.

Being in a confined space has made those details noisier, larger, more demanding. I lack the distractions of other places in the world that had filled my day, once, some time ago. Weeks ago? Months ago? The details are the same as ever they were. Today, though, I have eyes to see them.

I have been a sky watcher since childhood—a gift my mother gave me and my siblings. Go look at the clouds, and tell me what you see, she’d say. We’d imagine animals, bugs, cars conjured from our imagination. I didn’t know then that she wanted us to have the ability to imagine as well as the ability to see. The sound of those few words were deeply imprinted, likely because I did something with them, and so I have become a watcher of things, a noticer of details. And now details flood the spaces around me.

Perhaps my filters are intensified, amplified. Pressure can do that. I have to slow myself down, attempt to breathe slowly, easily, because those details can crowd in. Instead of just seeing the birds in the garden, I see a flock of small, brown-gray sparrows among little spikes of crab grass with where last week there were neither weeds or birds. I see the mottled feathers amid their fluttering dance and hear the squeaky chirping song they sing like a chorus of crisp, spiky warnings to the earwigs and larvae and white flies. What was a covey last week has become dozens of individuals today.

And the pressure, the pressure is not just the seclusion, not just the parade of people up and down the sidewalk with face coverings taking their daily walks, not just the reminders of how life has changed, but the incursion of death. It weighs on the soul. At this moment, 87, 530 people in the U.S. have been taken from us, 311,739 worldwide. By the time I’m finished writing this, more will have passed. People we know. People we love. That pressure causes us to change. It causes me to change. Causes me to become oddly shaped.

I’m sure I’ve changed in more ways than this one way. And I’m sure others are changing in different ways. Some move into denial. Some move into fear. Some move into action, making a positive difference, some stop moving, overwhelmed by it all, and some become better people. Knowing we are changing can help us decide how we want to direct that pressure. Being aware can give us a degree of control. We can direct our behaviors, our words, our plans. Easy? No. Doable? Yes.

Change is like that as I warp a bit into this quiet odd shape than somehow enables me to see the details of life. Pressure will do that to us.