Composition Book Clouds

I always marvel when the air is so clear that from certain places I can see mountains all around--the Cascades to the east, the Olympics to the west and the smaller blue bumps of foothills and the San Juan Islands. Often it is near sunset when I notice this, the low angle of light baking the Cascades in a pink alpenglow--a term I learned just after moving here (and just as Voltaire said if god did not exist we would have to invent him, I would have to invent a word for this effect if one didn't already exist).

Today the cloud cover is thick, pretty with striations, stripes of darker and lighter clouds. So like lined paper I put down my book and the words exist there in negative.

The rain stopped. It was brief and hard. Sharp, big drops--all of it unusual for here. Like a regular spring storm elsewhere. We don't get those. I can't see anything of the peaks, the ragged mountains, but the smooth ridge of Lummi Island radiates with purplish hue, the light just right that everything there has such clarity. I feel I can see individual trees and the spaces between them, and the small stretches where the slope's so great nothing but rock and dirt will hold.

And across the bay to the peninsula, the monopalette of gray shades is broken by a flash of bright green as just a bit of light rips through.

I like this place. It's like no other.