There’s this moment when your airplane is taking off into thunderstorms and you are about to enter a brilliant white thunderhead when your mind knows that it’s just water vapor but your heart lurches a bit because it knows you are about to smash into something craggy and solid.

But of course you don’t, and the plane shreds through the cloud as if it were . . . well . . . mist.

Suddenly, you are a ghost–able to move through spaces denied other humans, catching glimpses of the polished blue eye of sky through the mountains of vapor.

But then, you are in the the clouds, and now it’s pedestrian grey mist just like any foggy morning when you are late to work and so over the May grey because it’s almost June already and summer should be clean sun all day long.

As you are about to turn away from the window, you break out of the center of the cloud and now are below the blue and above the clouds that are fluffy and dotted over the land like drop biscuits over a chicken pot pie.

And through the gaps in the biscuits, you see their jagged shadows like a ghost map of continents over an endless sea of agricultural grid.

And then much later, but you haven’t looked away because you are captivated, you see the copper Mississippi snaking through the ridiculous green.