These are days of Impressionist skies, clouds daubed across their canvas like paints in the dusky shades of the storm.
Even our cloud patterns are different now, no longer tracking their usual cycles, and no longer as useful as predictive tools, either. The extremes of climate change and colonialism’s damage to the earth at the cellular level have rendered the notion of cycles and patterns mostly obsolete. Now, it’s a scramble just to keep up with whatever conditions present us, a now-daily exercise in adaptability and resilience.
Time was when thunderheads forecast imminent rain in summer and shelves of lenticular clouds foretold a change in the winter weather. Now, we get any or all year-round, or none at all. In recent days, it’s been a mix of the former with lowering mammatus clouds, together taking risky chances with a trickster wind to create the kind of wild weather that once was rare here: funnel clouds raveling and unraveling, spinning up into full-blown tornadoes and then spinning out again, leaving the more ordinary damage of hail in their wake.
Everything passed us by yesterday, save a few random drops near dusk and perhaps a few more overnight. But the sky is close and lowering now, threatening the kind of downpour more usually associated with July and August here than with the last day of May.
It’s a welcome development, of course; so, too, is the forecast that suggests that we might be granted intermittent rains all week. But never knowing what we will get, the twister or the two or three drops, makes planning difficult, to say nothing of planting. The garden will have to wait at least another day or two.
Still, the painted skies are beautiful: iron gray here, a little pale coral there; pewter and slate, violet and dove gray, mottled indigo and the occasional flash of fire all knifed and brushed together in a kaleidoscope of constantly-shifting shapes, from the Thunder Beings themselves to the occasional random heart.
It’s fitting, that last — well, all of it, really. In this place, weather is care, weather is love, weather is medicine — a wild, exhilarating gift of the spirits that keeps our world alive, and us with it. It’s the same in the lands of my own home, if manifest in very different ways, and it’s perhaps why I, a child of the storm, have managed so well in this place despite the irritating abundance of sun.
At this moment, the sky is shifting rapidly, clouds coursing past outside the windows now. You don’t need to see the splotches on the radar map to know that the rain is not so far off now; you can feel it in the slight heaviness in the air, in the gradual rising of the breeze. And you can see it in the shapes and colors overhead, bending low now to touch the earth: painted skies, themselves ready to color the land with rain.
~ Aji
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