I grew up in a place where the clouds always seemed to be quite close, almost oppressively so. When I first moved to the West, the clouds and skies were so vast as to be almost frightening. But I grew to love this beautiful open sky (someone even wrote a song mentioning “the spacious skies” of this area) and clouds are what makes it so. So, I went to an outdoor art festival recently, and the thing the impressed me the most were the clouds on that day.

The clouds were teasing us with the possibility of rain, but didn’t really deliver.

This place is very near to the mountains and does get more rain than the plains, so the trees are taller and more imposing here.

The clouds were keeping the temperature down and it was a perfect summer day for strolling about.

Rain is pretty much always a localized event in the West, with rain alternating with innocent blue skies. If by chance one is rained on, just wait a minute and the weather will change.

Even the reflections of the clouds are beautiful. The windows doing the reflecting are part of a replica of a French palace (why build an ordinary mansion when one can have their very own palace?)

And another local-ish person was inspired (perhaps by these Western skies) to write a song that says “it’s clouds illusions I recall” and that was what I celebrated this day.