Displaced

The wind must have blown while I slept. When I woke, half of yesterday's blossoms were gone from the poppy plants. A few of them haven't bloomed yet, so I watered them. The thunderstorms never arrived, so the remaining poppies probably wouldn't bloom without watering. I have semi-domesticated my wildflowers.

I sat on the back porch to observe the afternoon and my diminished poppy patch, and the striped cat napping nearby. From the porch I can see a patch of sky where clouds drift. As I watched, a cloud with an upturned hook on it emerged from behind the trees. I watched more of the cloud emerge, and the hook advanced until it was concealed by the bole of a pine next door, and the main body of the cloud obscured half the patch of blue sky.

I waited for the hook to reappear on the other side of the tree, but it never did. The whole intricate leading edge of the cloud had dissipated, leaving only a few bits of fluff, the white mass of more durable cloud flowing behind it. For some reason this made me very sad.

It's unlikely that any of this means anything. It's just what happened.

But now I have to try to remember that this is a Saturday in this June, and not some day in the middle of a week years ago that came and went with me unaware of it, which is the thought that keeps coming into my head.

I think that hook might have fished me before it vanished. Now there's no telling where I am or what has caught me for its dinner.