Picking through clouds

My profile that's on file at the travel agency says I like window seats. On aircraft where the in-flight meal is but a pseudo-fond memory and in-flight entertainment consists of shadow puppets you hand-project onto your tray using the overhead reading light, the window often represents the only source of creative diversion available to the weary traveller.

The anti-social writer in me also craves the fact that I won't be getting up every 20 minutes to allow my small-bladdered seatmates to make their way to the loo-in-the-sky. I simply sit down, pull up the shade, and enjoy the view.

As I take in the never-ending picture show above and below, I often take pictures. I know: not an ideal photographic situation. The plastic side windows on most planes today are scratched, smudged, and generally as clear as the ketchup bottle after a five-year-old is through with it. The atmosphere itself, thanks to the polluters in Sarnia (sorry, I couldn't resist), is oftentimes murky.

Yet I keep shooting. I always carry a few sets of fully charged batteries, and my camera has a huge memory card. I know that eventually I'll grab an image worth remembering.

This one presented itself on the late-afternoon puddle-jumper flight to London from Detroit. The best pictures, for some odd reason, always seem to happen on the last leg of the trip home. It's almost as if coming home makes everything I see through the lens that much more poignant. I wish I understood the mechanics of this mysterious process: I'd use it to take more pictures like this.

Your turn: You're lying on the lawn looking at clouds. What do you see?