This evening, as I was driving up the mountain to pick up my son after a long weekend with momma, I looked at the clouds with amazement. We'd had a partial overcast of cirrus all day. As the day wore on, patches and islands of cirrocumulus took over, and by late afternoon the cirrocumulus got thick. It was over a mile deep assuming cloudbase at say 15 thousand feet.
As I drove up the grade, I noticed wavy stripy "mackerel" portions of these clouds, random in their orientations and fractal in their sizes and shapes.
And what happened then was the knocking loose of a memory fifty years old.
I was possibly one and probably two. I remember looking up into an achingly blue winter sky filled with countless layers of high cloud. The ripples and dapples receded into the infinitesimal. Behind that, a preternatural hyaline blue. I stared into infinity. It's my first memory of the sky, and today it was recalled when I looked into a lesser but still awesome sky. Imagine this as a tiny detail.