How to Paint the Sky

Rebecca Macijeski

Why is the sky blue, but the clouds have so many different colors? It’s a signal question. When a child asks why is the sky blue what she means is suddenly I see the bigness of the world all around me like a thicket of knowledge I can’t get to the center of. But clouds don’t seem to follow rules. Clouds seem to be shapeshifters. Clouds seem to hold their wisps up to the whims of the sun and come back humming in purple, gold, long pink reaching, reds sharper than the tart berries you picked from a Nebraska tree while standing in the back of a pickup truck an oil painter drove there from South Dakota. In that memory it’s a long time since you were a girl. You’ve got a month lost in the flat alone with all the other artists opening into prairie and farm. The older women move their bodies and minds like they know what they are. The omens you scratch in the hollows of every notebook are irrefutably blind. The horizon throws midsummer storms down every night until you re-learn how to see, how to hear, how to let the wet electric dark into every pore. At the end of an early storm, before dusk, you all walk down the long quiet of the gravelly dirt road to read what’s left of what the thunder told. The oil painter points through the distance up into a golden broken spot of cloud and smiles. Look, guys, she says. God’s up there. In the yellow? And you’ll try the rest of your life to remember that color on that horizon, that burnishing moment right before everything changed.