Cotton candy skies

It doesn't seem that long ago, but the dates on the pictures say April 10. Honestly, seems like yesterday. I was out at the pond south of town, pretty much all by my lonesome, waiting for Mother Goose (not the Mother Goose) lead out a string of goslings I was only half conscious of being hatched. I just sat there, reminding myself that I was retired, had been for a dozen years already, and had never just sat there and looked out at a view I thought was absolutely lovely.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I know, and, to some, calling the scene above, or this one below, "absolutely lovely" strains good sense. Stick with me here, even if you were looking for the Grand Tetons. This is what I saw that fair afternoon, a country scene in northwest Iowa, with gorgeous chunks of frosting, a sky full of bright, white cotton candy. It was lovely, all right. And I knew I was telling myself it was because I'd actually taken the time to sit and watch, to listen, to see.

The real blessing of that afternoon, months ago now, is that I was free to look and free to see. 

 The two of us live in a post-diluvian world now, a world after the flood; even though that drenching is behind us, it dominates our lives, our time, our sensibilities. The bottom floor of our house is bare naked, stripped clean like stored succession of store mannikins. The insulators are coming soon to do their thing, and the dry wall is ordered, soon to arrive. 

We're going to live on one floor for a while, at least through my recovery from back surgery in August. It'll be interesting, but we'll be a one-story couple, living upstairs where things look pretty much the same as they did before the river came to visit. 

Nonetheless, we're still suffering from homesickness, for which there is no immediate cure, at least nothing in a month or two. There's a deathly ambience to saying, aloud, "things will never be the same," but they won't, not until there's a brand new normal, which seems, well, out of reach.

Now it's fair to say that long before the Floyd chose to flood us out, we'd been in a rainy season. Just about every day storm clouds would threaten, and we'd get some rain--never a ton, just some. The water table, I'm sure, was really high and the sky was full of the drama that forecasts trouble and often brings it. 

Yesterday, I decided to go back home (to our apartment, from our home) a different way, just to have a look at the river, thusly--

Here 'tis. Doesn't look like a disaster waiting to happen. Here's the Floyd River, a river named for Sgt. Floyd, who died where this sweet thing flows into the Missouri. Here's the monster river that crept up five feet (five feet!) above the previous record for flooding. Five feet. This entire scene was a lake.

I stopped for a minute to snap this picture with my phone (my camera is a casualty), and I couldn't help notice that those blobs of cotton candy I'd loved a couple of months ago were here again. I had to stop to notice, to see. I hadn't noticed.

Look at 'em. They're gorgeous, even if they're not the Grand Tetons.

Seems to me I have to take the time to look. It's always that way with beauty, always that way with us.

Well, me anyway.