I barely, just barely out ran the rain tonight. On my drive home, I felt too tired to create a self portrait inside so I was hunting for a photo as the clouds swirled and drifted into thunder heads. There was a deep blue thickening up the west and I was chasing after it. I stopped about a mile from the house and pulled into a residential area. The plan was to run up — just the most massive hill —and get a wide shot of the road and said hill with the clouds rolling in but… It just wasn’t right. I saw the photo clearly in my head but it fell flat in reality. Maybe, for the best, because it did involve a lot of darting on and off the road on a blind approach.

On my way up the hill, before knowing all this, the sprinkles were just beginning. And I heard a plane so, naturally, I looked up. Shocker, I know. And there it was, almost floating in and out of this gray haze. I haven’t seen that before. The opacity faded in and out as it passed between these soft, foggy layers. I almost missed it, focusing and adjusting the settings but I got it, just in time before it was lost in the cloud cover.

On the way back down, it was a mad sprint to the car as the rain was roaring and the camera was exposed. Editing these, I get a bit envious of the simplicity of it all. The plane slips in and out of view, sheltered and isolated. I live near an airport and I watch them roll in from time to time. Some days, there’s one after the other, crystal clear. But occasionally, I can only hear them, obscured and guarded by cloud cover. Such a simple thing, wrapped in tiny liquid water droplets, high above it all. There’s a Tiny Moving Parts song called Day Drunk. And it goes like…

It’s just me in the kitchen looking up at the clouds
I wonder what they talk about

And it would make an interesting story if someone could figure out how to tell it.