Gray-Green Summer Sky

I have a secret love affair with the warm afternoon summer rain that turns the sky a deep, dark gray, but leaves the sun still shining. Ordinary leaves on trees shine a vibrant yellow-green against the charcoal sky that makes them more than three dimensional in a way I can’t explain. Every leaf a mile away can be seen as an individual part of the tree. It has to be the heavenly version of limelight. No human can stand inside of it.

I think of that as my gray-green summer sky, my summer painting by the artist of creation. I have several images of green-gray skies inside my head. I can tell you exactly where I was each time I saw one, because every time, it stops me into stillness. I feel as if I’m looking into love for the first time. No photograph I have ever seen has done justice to its vibrancy.

My friend Kate and I met such a sky while driving through the mountains of Nevada. Knowing rain would reach us soon, we stopped to take in the view and put the top up on the car. That’s when the dark, mountain sky gave us a rainbow shaped in a perfect circle. Spectacular and breathtaking. Yet it seemed natural too. We stood in disbelief, like we were seeing our first snow, like we had found the pot of gold, like children who see wonderful things everyday of their lives. It didn’t matter that the raindrops started to reach where we were standing. We were part of something that we knew just didn’t happen. We tried to take a picture, but we didn’t have the right equipment. I’m kind of glad we didn’t, because some things don’t belong in photographs. They belong in memories. . . .

I once stood under a concrete canopy by a high school doorway, talking to friends while we waited out an event postponed until the rain went by. My eye had been transfixed by such a sky. Though I conversed as much as everyone. My arm was outstretched into the rain. My hand held a paper cup for an hour to catch the rain. It was a gift for a boy I’d see when the event began. What he would do then with a cup of rainwater now only makes me smile. It was the gesture and the romance that I gave. I wonder if he remembers it. I know I’ll never forget doing it. Maybe I did it for the rain and me and not for him at all.

The thing about the gray-green sky is that the sun must shine. And I must stand backlit by the sun to see it. It’s safe and warm. It feels like the calm before a storm, while I am wrapped inside my mother’s arms. It’s filled with the promise of everything that ever was or might be. It turns ordinary leaves on trees a vibrant yellow-green that makes them more than three dimensional.

The gray-green, summer sky makes an ordinary me backlit by the sun feel amazed, in awe, and incredibly alive.

—me strauss Letting me be