summertime clouds

Summer is still and always my favorite even though I trace it to summer vacation those years from after first grade, summer 1942, when I finished being six years old; through summer 1956, when I'd finished my junior year at Florida, and Linda transferred from her woman's college in Virginia to Florida and we went to summer school together so she could take enough prerequisite courses to start Fall 1956 semester in the College of Arts & Sciences. 

Me, I took a business admin course or two so as to lighten my class schedule for my upcoming senior year; plus, I took the most worthwhile course I ever took, Typing. 

The following Summer 1957, we were married at Holy Nativity Episcopal Church, Panama City, then I went off to Navy OCS in Newport, Rhode Island, where the summer was so cool that I thought I was living in a refrigerator. And the realization came to me one morning while standing at attention in my sailor uniform, an officer candidate seaman apprentice, that summer vacations were over for a lifetime. 

Maybe the other thing that helps make summertime my favorite is the clouds in our Florida Gulf Coast summer skies. The varieties of clouds. And I've never been able to enjoy them anyplace as well as from here in 7H, where the sea stretches out to the horizon formed by Shell Island, and from there up ninety degrees and around a hundred-eighty degrees, is the sky with its show of clouds as infinite in design as the snowflakes those winters the Navy had us living in other climes. 

The only other place we lived with such a stretch of eternity was the wonderful little hilltop house we had, Navy quarters, in Yokohama from 1963 to 1966, looking out over a wide expanse of Tokyo  Bay. But, honestly, those years I was looking down the hill at quaint old Japan during daylight, and peering into the heavens with my telescope at night; paying no mind to clouds. 

In fact, I always rather took clouds for granted until when, during our Apalachicola years, a parishioner who has become a lifetime dear friend who'd relocated from "way up north" remarked on the magnificent clouds we have here.

They're a highlight of life these days into my extreme old age. Clouds, sea, ospreys, pelicans, gulls and wading birds. Ships and boats arriving and departing. Sometimes porpoises rolling; now and then an enormous shark thrashing around in the close up shallows having a dinner of fresh caught mullet. Clouds in brilliant sunrises and sunsets. Rainstorms that usually roll in from the west as they move on toward the Atlantic, those overwhelmingly beautiful heavy, dark, black thunderstorm clouds. Not to mention hurricane storm bands rapidly circling from east to west as we pack the car to leave town.

Clouds. Always clouds, and they seem most magnificent in summertime.

RSF&PTL

T