No Clouds for You

By Liz Zuercher

For my photographer husband, Gary, the perfect ocean sunset requires just the right configuration of clouds, but any clouds in the sky will send him to the beach in pursuit of his next great photograph. Lately, though, Mother Nature has not cooperated.

Late each afternoon he checks the sky. If there are clouds he is out the door in a flash, on his way to the beach. If he returns with stooped shoulders and a slow gait I know the clouds were gone by the time he reached the ocean shore.

I’ve gone with him on some of these excursions, and I’ve seen how fast the clouds can disappear. It’s uncanny. One minute you are looking out toward the horizon and perfect tufts or swirls decorate the sky. You turn your back on them for an instant, and when you look again they have flattened to a murky haze. Then before your eyes even the haze dissipates entirely and all that remains is an empty ceiling turning gray in the waning light.

Gary has taken this dearth of clouds to be a taunt by Mother Nature. He hears her saying, “No clouds for you.” That has become the mantra that describes any number of situations in our lives. Anything that is beyond our control invokes the mantra. Anything that doesn’t turn out the way we’d hoped. Anything that makes us sigh. No clouds for you. The words themselves have become a big sigh.

But while Gary mourns the absence of literal clouds, I wish the figurative clouds in my creative life would dissipate as quickly and effortlessly as those perfect tufts over the ocean at sunset. I have been trying to shoo my clouds away for five years as I’ve worked to bring a complete novel out of their shadows. But they’re stubborn, refusing to clear. They obscure the path and I get lost. Those clouds frustrate me. I want them to give way to clear skies where unobscured sunlight illuminates the road to the end of the story. I yearn for easy, carefree cloudless writing days. I want Mother Nature to say to me, “No clouds for you.”

Or so I think. For Gary the clouds are necessary to his art. They create tension, drama and conflict. They make his sunset photograph interesting, give dimension, color and contrast to his image. The clouds are the picture. They are the art. They are what draws people’s eyes to the picture, what speaks to them and touches them and makes them say “What a beautiful picture. Isn’t nature the best artist?” The clouds don’t obscure the light, they define it, reflect and amplify it, scatter it across the sky in a million different directions. Without them, the picture is dull and uninteresting, and it goes unnoticed.

So maybe I have it all wrong. Maybe the clouds are the story, and I need to examine them more closely instead of shooing them away.