Dawn Clouds

To be home and see the clouds overhead as the sun comes up is a wondrous thing.The sun is barely starting to show these days when I leave work at six in the morning, but forty minutes later when I'm home it's light enough to read the newspaper that's lying in the driveway waiting for me.

The clouds are soft insubstantial things, looking exactly like the proverbial cotton wool floating overhead. They absorb and reflect the light, changing shades as the sun climbs higher, from gray to pink to orange to yellow. On the ground the sea grapes and mangroves are a firm shade of black in the shade of the house.Some nights work tires me out from the sheer weight of calls, other nights the hours doze by in a coma of absolute nothingness when no one in town is stirring and the minutes drag by like hours. Other nights one finds oneself trapped in a room for twelve hours with a happy colleague with verbal diarrhea or an unhappy colleague slumped under a cloud of intimate unhappiness and either condition can lead to exhaustion.And if a few minutes staring at the astonishing variations in clouds and light isn't enough to restore good cheer and compose the brain for bed and deep refreshing sleep, a glance at my every cheerful even tempered companion usually does the trick.While I watered the fruit trees, more or less iguana ravaged, she curled up on the grass bed I made for her and kept a close eye on my activities. A walk with a dog, a little cloud watching and one is calm and ready for sleep.