This morning I drove to work beside clouds. Clouds! It was rainy last night, so the clouds came down nice and close, leaving a few wispy ones hanging low today, under the bright blue sky of arctic summer mornings.
Mountainous living is something else.
My ears pop when we drive up the hill to our house. My lungs burn when I run as I adjust to the higher elevation, (still waiting to acclimatize, make the burning stop already!). My butt has gotten the workout of a lifetime traversing up and down, hiking here and there.
Sometimes when I look out my balcony window, the color of the sky behind the houses on my street seems to be a dark blue, like the sky at home right before a thunderstorm rolls in. Here, it just means you aren’t looking high enough. Past the dark blue of the faraway mountains is the real sky, the bright blue that stays until 10:30 p.m. these days and is back up by 4:00 the next morning.
All of this, and there’s still nothing as surreal as looking out the passenger window to see a row of tall, skinny pine trees and a long white cloud right beside me, following me to work. It’s like something from my imagination, like I’ve flown up to a dream world in the sky where there isn’t just birds and airplanes, but a whole green paradise with turquoise waterways, purple fireweeds, and peaks of green and blue.
I don’t want to get used to this, I hope it’s this dreamy as long as I’m here.

Labels: moving, Whitehorse