Arizona Skies

Arizona skies, especially during our monsoon season, can give us spectacular displays of clouds—huge piles of whipped cream that mushroom up and up and up, with occasional dark bands of rain in all directions on the horizon. Or sometimes we'll have a haboob, a dust cloud that appears overhead, sometimes a double rainbow. I know that sky is sky anywhere in the world and must display the same vistas as I see here, but I don’t remember any skies like these, not in California when we were there in the Mojave Desert, not in New York when we were under all those gray drizzlers of Chautauqua County, and not even in the big sky country of South Dakota where my wife and I grew up. Sunrises and sunsets seem to be more wildly colorful here than elsewhere, and night skies often look too beautiful to be real, like what some wannabe artist might paint on black velvet. Or maybe it’s just that I’m old and don’t remember skies from my youth, from other times and places. Lord knows, there are a good many things I no longer remember from my youth, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The memory is a fickle beast, and we often fill in gaps with details that aren’t necessarily true, details we color to make the memories more palatable. Take any two people and have them describe the same event as they both saw it, and you’ll get two dramatically divergent pictures. Where were you when news of 9/11 hit us in the face? What were you doing? Chances are, most of us won’t remember or we’ll fill in the memory. Back to clouds for a moment. I remember a summer from my twenties when I was helping build small country bridges in South Dakota, riding out and back from the work site in the back of a pickup. One late afternoon on our way home, the sky was filled with dark clouds, clouds with scattered tornadoes, like witches’ brooms extending from the thunderheads down to the South Dakota countryside. Did I really see as many as five or six tornadoes or did I make them up? I don’t know and there’s no way now to verify or discount the memory. The memory is a fickle beast.