The little angel took up far too much space on the blue nylon lounge chair, so much that I had to put my head at the foot end and my feet up on the head end, my toes pointing toward the sky. I'd forced her to put on my baseball hat and cover herself in towels as we lay in the sun to dry off before heading to the grocery store. I worry about her fair skin, have since she was born. She seemed content to lay there, staring off in the distance after playing in the water for hours.
It was in this unusual position that I noticed the clouds.
At first glance, they seemed to be the usual cotton puffballs of a Kansas City summer, but the longer I lay there, the more I noticed them morphing quickly, little edges pulling away and reforming into another nebulous blob nearby. Around me continued the racket of the first weekend at the neighborhood pool: parents yelling at their children to get those cell phones away from the water and wear some sunscreen, for God's sake; children shrieking and hurling their sixty pounds of energy into the pool at top speed, boats motoring up to the beach on the lake down the hill.
The sounds of the pool and the motion of the clouds pronounced our placidity, and I thought this is how it happens, then, that things slide in and out of their places in the universe. In the midst of chaos, we enter and exit and metamorphose into a new thing; jobs are lost and babies are born and children grow up and leave, and the clouds break away and reform without looking like a thing has changed.
