I returned to belly dance classes with a friend last night. Seeing old friends and dancing again was a delight. But an even greater delight was encountering the skies driving home, due south.

The rains the last weeks have brought beautiful clouds of all kinds, colors, shapes and strengths. I have been noticing them. Last night, the north sky in the rear view mirror was a smeared gray with a deepening peach that left me wondering what it held with every glance backward. I had to keep tearing my eyes away to the road in front of me.

The skies east were filled with low clouds, more solid, scrubbed metallic in their sameness, dully fading together with little interest. The west though was breathtaking. Long clouds of all shades of dark to light. Bright white streaking through deep black.  Tall, bright ones too, building high as old rounded mountains with softened edges. And all styles in between layered into and around each other and clear sky.

Suddenly at a low break in the green landscape of undulating fields the setting sun showed itself. My breath caught, the car swerved. For I have never seen a sun so bright deep, dark red-orange, burning into the horizon, rays of it showing the path it had fallen out of a thick strip of deepest blue-gray cloud line. I wish I’d pulled over and run back to see it again. As it was it was a game of hide-and-seek as the fields rolled and the road curved away and to it. I caught brief glimpses of it a few times more and then, gone. I continued on, its vividness holding my mind’s narrative.

Miles further, almost home, the east sky soothed with the softness of white-gray cover that is indistinguishable from dusk. A fading of nothing into nothing. Until the moment the full moon – large, luminous – began rising from within the solidity. In front of some, cut off in a full half by the band below. “Oh my god!” escaped with a breath. My view of the other side of the duality in day’s ending pulsed in and out as it hid behind buildings I passed just as I was able to look. But with each moment I could see it, it was higher, it’s fullness more revealed. As the earth beneath my moving car turned, the fullest moon rose itself free from the shadow of what hid it.