I remember when I was a young boy, lying on my back in the hillside pastures near my central New York home and watching puffs of cumulus clouds float by overhead. I could see animals and faces and sky castles in their ever changing shapes.



When I was a young man and courting, I recall lying in the tall grass near a river bank in Illinois with a college girlfriend. We watched the clouds drift by as told each other about the fantastic things we saw in them, each of us sharing our imaginations with words and fingers pointed into the air.



Now, I am older. I stand arm in arm with my wife, admiring a most beautiful sunset or a majestic cloud bank rising over the mountains, more beautiful than all those that went before. Each time I see the patterns of light and shadow in the clouds, I find that they have improved with age ... or perhaps it's my ability to appreciate them that has improved.



The clouds are ever changing and they are always the same. Like the clouds, I have changed, yet I remain the same.



Maybe we are all clouds.