The Tyranny of Blue Sky Thinking

View from rehab, August 2021 - by S. Vardatira

On July 20, 2021, three years ago to the day and just as I was beginning to format the 2022 Head in the Clouds Amherst wall calendar, I checked into the hospital for a planned, routine hip replacement surgery. While I wasn’t promised immediate healing, everyone – from my surgeon to my primary care provider to friends who had “been there, done that” – affirmed I would start walking and return home the next day (or, maybe, depending on how things went, the day after that). In actuality, I didn’t return home for nine weeks.

Following the surgery, I spent one week in the ICU, followed by three weeks in an acute rehab facility and five weeks in sub-acute rehab. My progress was excruciatingly slow – overnight, I had gone from relative autonomy to utter powerlessness. It wasn’t until a year later, when I finally forced myself to read my entire surgical record, that I learned there had been real concern about whether I would ever walk again.

There never was a 2022 Head in the Clouds Amherst wall calendar. In early August, as I was taking breaks from my rehab facility’s daily PT sessions to continue formatting the calendar on my laptop, I finally faced the inevitable: even with the generosity of friends who had offered to help, I could not make it happen. Feeling a swirl of emotion (but primarily a sense of failure), I saved the calendar file, closed InDesign, and shut down my laptop. I glanced up at my room’s narrow window, positioned near the top of the ceiling, well above eye level. It was impossible to get close enough to see anything happening on the ground, but it did allow a glimpse of the sky – not enough to see what was coming over the horizon, or the position of the moon or sun, but if a cloud drifted directly into frame, I’d be able to follow its brief path from left to right beyond the glass.

Since arriving days earlier, however, the sky had been endlessly blue, with not even a wisp of cirrus to vary the scene. Just that morning, one of the nursing assistants had greeted me by cheerily commenting on the lack of cloud cover: “It’s such a beautiful, completely blue sky out there – perfection!” I had begun to ponder the possibility I had somehow landed in an alternate, utterly boring universe, devoid of clouds. Thus, it was something of a surprise to glance up at that moment and see darkening cumulonimbus swirling outside my window. A summer storm!

Without waiting for an escort or permission to leave my room, I grabbed my cell phone (for capturing the view) and clumsily maneuvered my wheelchair down the hallway to a large floor-to-ceiling window I remembered seeing when I first arrived. A CNA made a half-hearted attempt to intervene, but when I pointed up, her attention followed. For the briefest instance, lightning illuminated the darkness, and the sky opened, sending sheets of rain and hail cascading across the parking lot, hammering on the roof, demanding entry. And then, seconds later, all was silent.

My view improved considerably when I moved to sub-acute rehab. A window with a full view of the sky ran along one entire side of my ground-floor room. Although the new facility was challenging in countless ways, that window, and the ever-changing clouds above, saved me. But not just me – I noticed that everyone, patients and staff alike, were drawn to the building’s windows and doors, hoping to glimpse a rainbow, drifting cumulus, or a rippling, silvery mackerel sky.

In early September, a few weeks before I would return home, the remnants of Hurricane Ida swept across the Valley. From my window, I watched the clouds build and gather overhead. Random leaves fell into view, diving and rising briefly on the wind before coming to rest, finally, in the meadow. Outside, under the portico, I watched as a visiting family stashed dinner tupperwares into canvas totes and pushed chairs back into place under the picnic table. Another trio glanced up, aware and yet unperturbed by the impending storm.

That evening, long after I should have been asleep, I peered into the night and the all-enveloping darkness. The streetlights blinked on and off each time a tree branch, swaying under the ferocious wind, obscured my sightline. It was raining hard, the remnants of Ida thrumming off the roof, gathering in rivulets and puddling across the sidewalks. The parking lot looked oddly empty, only a few staff cars scattered here and there. A rush of air wrapped around the rain. A lightning bolt threw the trees into sharp relief. In that moment, a nursing assistant, who had just gotten off shift, jumped through the entryway into the night and ran zigzagging across the parking lot, hooting and hollering, spinning, and holding her arms out to the rain and the wind.

I was at once inside and outside – dry and drenched in rain, motionless and crackling with electricity.

The manifesto of the international Cloud Appreciation Society includes a “pledge to fight ‘blue-sky thinking’ wherever we find it,” adding, “life would be dull if we had to look up at cloudless monotony day after day.” In that spirit, here’s wishing you breathtaking, dramatic skies, clear starry nights, and always living with your head in the clouds – no matter the weather.

Dawn from rehab, August 2021 - by S. Vardatira