clouds

some 37 of them

I kept a diary while I lived in Cornwall last year. I wrote most days and sent email “dispatches” to close friends. I kept all the writing in one place on my computer. Towards the end of my time in the UK, I began to realize that I was writing quite a lot about clouds. Some years ago, I had made a new year’s resolution which was to write about the clouds every day. I think I had made it half way through March when I ran out of ways to describe Portland’s flat, paste grey skies. But the clouds in England were magnificent this year. I had no trouble finding words for them.

A quick search informs me that the word “cloud” comes up 37 times in my dispatch from last year. Here’s most of the 37 odd instances, patched together in chronological order of the season’s passing:

It was one of those days in the garden where I was constantly zipping and unzipping my fleece. The clouds would fold over themselves in front of the sun and I would zip up to my chin. Then the sun would melt through and it would be almost hot. Then it would be drizzling and I’d secure my hat again. Always changing. The plants looked the same to be in the sun and the shade, but I knew they were growing the whole time.

In the evening, we ran the ducks up the road from their new pen back to their old field. They looked like one golden cloud, hovering low over the land. I love the way all their necks look as I walk behind them, bobbing back and forth. Broom sticks or pendulums or metronomes. One of them was struggling to keep up with the herd and eventually just stopped on the side of the drive. Olive instantly ran right up to it and put her flat hand gently across its back. She then picked it up and carried it the rest of the way to the field. When I had to pick up another slow bird she warned me, lifting her shirt to conceal a reddening scratch around the belly button, that they can get you with their feet if you’re not careful.

There were clouds above the trees this morning. Clouds which looked like they’d been carefully fashioned all night long by a divinity who had spun them from the finest fresh cotton. Clouds which were rich with depth and happening. Clouds which were flat on the bottom and gilded on top, perfect fat poofs floating low in the sky. As if there were nothing to it. There isn’t really, but I was floored just the same.

It’s Sunday night and it’s a little humid outside and the clouds are stretching across the farm leaving keyholes of light contorted by the wall of wind pushing the weather. It rained today for the first time in three weeks. When I stepped outside, I filled my lungs with the mushroomy dampness and watched raindrops slip down the sides of the new pink roses outside the restaurant. I have had a calm day off, mostly inspired by my uneven feeling body this morning. Last night, Lilly, Sophie and I crashed a house party at Alex’s.

Before that I spent the day on the south coast, between a town called Fowey (which is pronounced “Foy”) and the beach at Lantic Bay. I took myself to lunch at North Street Kitchen where I had the best fried fish I’ve had in my life. It was pollack, very lightly battered, served alongside a curried mayonnaise and a perfectly de-seeded lemon cheek. I watched the chef as he battered and lowered it into the fryer, dragging the fish with his wrist gently back and forth through the fryer oil before completely dropping it in. The fryer had that crisp and snapping bubbling sound, like the oil was fresh that day. The fish seemed to cook for no time at all, ready in less than five minutes. Everything on the plate was golden except for the inside of the fish, which was wet shell white. I used my hands to break it into perfect hand held pieces for dipping, which happened with hardly any effort. The flesh of the fish was still a shade translucent and reflecting the light in the clouds. Perfectly cooked and perfectly seasoned. The mayonnaise was delicious and there was a generous amount of it on the plate. It is always miraculous on the rare occasion when fried food tastes lighter than air.

Driving home from Tesco, the clouds were stunned by sun from behind. I’ve never understood the phrase “silver lining” because it’s always a golden lining. If the clouds are lined by light, that light is so brilliantly gold you can hardly look at them. It rained all day yesterday so the valley’s saturated green sprang to focus. The clouds drifted in front of the sun and threw shadows on the fields, making them flicker and darken like stained glass.

Tom said this task is “the pain of raising birds past 58 days. It’s around 58 days that their mature feathers start to grow in. The abattoir just can’t manage to remove all the feathers from older birds.” Tom has been back and forth from France about six times over the course of the last 10 years. There is a man in Burgundy named Pascal Laprée who raises about 1,000 ducks a year. The breed is the same one we raise, a cross between pekin and aylesbury. They are plump and cloud white with orange beaks and feet. I have tried many times in this dispatch to capture their whiteness but it alludes me still, especially now that they have all been slaughtered. 1,000 ducks is not very many in the grand scheme of raising animals for a living. Ducks are incredibly generous birds. The Laprée operation doesn’t sell whole ducks. All of their products are value added. Rillettes, sausages, cured hams, confit, patés, duck fat. Tom says that this value ends up profiting them more than 100 euros a bird.

I stopped in Truro for dinner on my way home from Falmouth last night. The wind had ripped down the coast all day, whipping up clouds and sunshine and sideways rain from nowhere and nothing. In Truro the sun was setting and orange flakes of cloud floated in front of a drooping purple storm front. The Indian restaurant I had googled was mediocre, but there were thinly sliced segments of citrus in my curry and they made it taste sweetly bitter.

All the trees have leafed out. It happens in what feels like an instant. But why is that? Surely the buds fatten, burst, and flop over the course of days. I remember watching all the shades of new green on the hillside in the valley at the farm. From far away, the buds on branch tips are a loose knit of fuzzy young green. They have a waking pastel brightness against the mahogany of bare branches. On cloudless days, the sun bounces on this green and shines everywhere between the trees. There is little shade.

Then the leaves are born. There is a new darkness, there is a new sound. Every year I notice this phenomenon, the way the leaves cast shadows to bring night into the long summer day. I have been watching the trees here and the ground around them. It is harder to see the birds in the branches. It is harder to see the ground. The light in the day is darker, despite there being 13 hours of it in late May. On the hedges and ridge lines the trees form a black line blocking my view to the next field. Their full shrouded heads are rounded, partial portals behind the stone barns on the farm. The wind sears through a sycamore, and I remember the sound of the wind in the summer. Not a cold creaking or a whistle. A brushing, sanding, staying sound. The leaves form countless new passageways for the wind to turn through so that when it runs towards a fully leafed out tree, we hear the gentle chorus of its many paths-taken shimmy to life.

With Will and Ellie we played cards and attended cream tea. “Cream Tea” is a Cornish tradition of enjoying tea and scones with clotted cream. I had booked the cream tea as a little Cornish treat for my visitors, so I was delighted to hear of Ellie’s obsession with clotted cream. I drove the group along back roads and Laura gasped every time she saw a car coming in the other direction. We walked along the coastal path, floating in and out of clouds. I watched the edge where the cliffs eat the ocean, how its jagged jaws deflate against big waves. The four of us walked in Dartmoor and argued over the definition of a “moor.” It has to be open, I said, with little to no trees. Typically the definition involves heather, but in Cornwall it’s more about gorse and large outcroppings of granite. Cornwall has been heavily mined for its granite over the centuries and often one finds either defunct or still active quarries within its moors. We climbed over the rocks and felt the wind sweep across them, swirling uninhibited from as far as Norway and Spain. Ellie wanted to see wild horses so when we spotted a few on the other side of the rocks, we approached. We stood and watched them graze and scratch themselves in the flickering reeds, with their manes and tails blowing like broom shadows away from their bodies.

I thought I’d send the dispatch as it is but then I saw the clouds tonight. I was driving back from Bude and watching them. It was nearly 9pm and they stretched across the horizon line like a shelf, impossibly white still at their billowing tops, despite there being almost no light left in the sky. The clouds were white, the sky was blue. A wan blue, yes, but clearly blue as if just birthing the idea of blue. I don’t understand how summer light does this, how it never fully lets go of itself. If you had to give the feeling of letting go a color, what would it be?

I drove Ziggy and I back to the farm. On the way home, we crossed through Bodmin moor and I looked out over the land to the south. A thick gray front had covered the sky up to the edge of the land, but just out at the coast the sun was breaking over the water. My eyes scanned the land up to the sea, all in dark shadow from the clouds. But the sea glittered like all the right words as the sun folded the clouds’ pages back on themselves. I said, “Ziggy! Look!” He turned his head and said, “O. Wow.”

The sun was a bulging drop of clementine neon, seeping between shelves of smoke grey clouds. With my head just peeking up from the surface of the water, I watched as Rose shot up from the spray of a huge wave, her body a hoisted trident of life. The sun had dripped low on the horizon and the color of the water transitioned from bright blue green to limpid black. Something about the darkening made everything quieter. Color and sound moved together, changed, while the sea carried on.

Wagner is all over the Into The Inferno Soundtrack. Herzog loves opera. I screwed the volume dial up high and watched as night and my car’s swerving sewed the moon, stitch by stitch, in and out of the lacy outer edge of a single cloud. I chose the way home through Davidstow, keeping my eyes on the moon. I turned my car lights off and the blaring music and the moon together made a surging light which spread mercilessly across the airfield. I thought to myself, “it would be okay to die now.”

Cornwall has surrounded me with water. When I watch the clouds it is water and light that I’m watching. When I watch the sea or the rain or the pond, water. When I am in the kitchen, cooking down hundreds of pounds of plums into jam — plums which I had only just picked with fresh rain drops still speckling their early morning skins — it is water I am watching evaporate. When I am in the bakery, handling dough which is hydrated at 110, sometimes 130 percent water, it is an orb of water I am moving around in my hands. Water that has been bound up by grain, which once would not have grown without water.

Yesterday I went to Crackington Haven with Bella and Toby. It has been cloudy the last few days and I have watched the “sunset” only through them. Light reverberates in hutches of the clouds. As the sun begins to lower in the sky, light changes color in these little hiding places. We ran towards the sea, which was still as glass, and I watched how rigid shafts of light from an opening in the clouds struck the horizon boldly. The water was shallow far beyond the break. We walked on our knees through it while keeping our shoulders submerged, the water felt somehow warmer than the air. Toby’s teeth chattered. We looked back towards the shore where a tar grey front approached with rumbles of flickering light. “I saw lightening on the way over here,” I cautioned, remembering that water is probably the worst place to be in a lightening storm.

I don’t know what the wind was today. I kept thinking about it as colors, sounds, dreams. It was all of them. And yet I couldn’t see it. Couldn’t even see its traces in trees because on the moor there are none. The wind is invisible. At my feet the water had pooled in every crevice. The wild horse’s hoof paths were rivulets. It was only there that I saw the wind making waves. And the reflection of the clouds chased each wave further up and out and onto the land where the wind was invisible again. We jumped up and we landed in a different place when we hit the ground. Storms every 30 minutes released a thousand suns, each one breathing down between ferocious cloud exhales of sideways hail. In the screaming wind we didn’t know where we were. The inside of my hood made a sound like a giant flag flapping.