A recent evening storm that came literally out of the blue reminded me again why I love the prairie skies and Meadowbrook Park. As Marilyn and I began our walk around the prairie, I exclaimed at the blue-violet sky in the west. I wanted to gather the blue-violet in my arms and offer it to Amy, my beloved friend, whom I miss so much. She loved that color. On that evening, with the sky changing and the wind picking up, the thought of gathering the sky in my arms and handing it to Amy made me smile. I imagined her up in the sky like I used to imagine a white-bearded, smiling god when I was a child.
As Marilyn and I rounded the curve, stopping to photograph the western sky, a woman and two children joined us on the path. They had been heading home through the prairie to the nearby neighborhood.
"We had to turn around and come back to the park when we saw the sky," the woman said, laughing.
The sky was becoming more dramatic by the minute, and then the wind picked up in a way I had only experienced at sunset at Lake Michigan. There the waves became bigger and faster; here, the wind became louder and stronger.
I looked up.
"That's not a tornado coming, is it?" I asked Marilyn, the native Midwesterner, the one I have to urge to shelter during a tornado warning.
"No. It's not green," she said, not sounding as certain as I would have liked, as I noticed a twist of grey in the orange sky. Our car was on the other side of the park; turning back wouldn't be any faster than moving forward, so we kept going, walking, laughing at the wind and then the rain, stopping to watch a deer and her baby, and being greeted by a rainbow when we finally got to the car.
I felt like I'd been to another planet and back again.
