47/100 - Home in the clouds
It can take years to see what's always there. Mountains where always in the landscape until they weren't anymore for me. Once I took a plane that dropped me in Kansas, the middle of the Great Plains, and I lived there for a year where I met people that had never seen a mountain. Which was wonderful because it was like meeting someone who had never seen the sea, or tasted rice, or done something otherwise uneventful. And of course I wanted to judge them but the joke was on me because I had never experienced the Plains. Because you can see a mountain but with the Plains you experience the absence of seeing, you see far, you see the same over and over, you see cloudless skies from horizon to horizon.
Kansas was another world to me. It redefined my idea of what could be exotic. And it surely redefined what it meant to be born where I was born. I was born in the Andean Mountains and I realized that aspect of the landscape was as meaningful as language or culture. A mountain always in sight. The sky always framed by lines like torn paper. Clouds always, never ever a pure blue sky.
Los Angeles -where I live- has similar vast skies which still surprise me, and seriously windy roads are not too far but are not part of my daily experience. But with Los Angeles I don't know what is the thing that's always there and I haven't yet learned to see.
Home in the clouds is unusually tall at 3" by 5". Available here(sold).