When our girls were little, we read a lot of picture books and developed many favorites, including Harry the Dirty Dog, Olivia the Pig, The Day the Crayons Quit, and several by David Wiesner, including Art & Max, Tuesday, and Sector 7. One of the strong appeals of Wiesner’s books, including Sector 7 was that it truly was a picture book. He told the whole story with only his illustrations, and his illustrations were grandly elaborate, easily catching our daughters’ attentions and imaginations.
One day, we had to drive into Asheville for an appointment and passed by a Duke Energy power plant with its large steam towers that expelled puffy white billowing clouds of steam into the air that we could see clearly and obviously from the road we were on. As my oldest daughter caught sight of the shifting steam clouds in the air, she called out with great excitement, “Mama! It’s Sector 7!” For many years, and even still sometimes now, whenever we caught a glimpse of the steam towers and their puffing steam clouds, we referred to the plant as Sector 7.
This is one of my most favorite and enchanting memories of the long drives we had to make for some of the appointments we had when my neurodivergent teens were younger. There was something magical about searching the horizon for Sector 7 as we made our way into the city on those days. Of course, clouds are a bit magical by their very nature, floating overhead, creating recognizable shapes that almost immediately morph into something new only seconds later.
One of my favorite things still today is when one of my girls points to a cloud in the sky and announces what she thinks it looks like. I love that they can tap so easily into their imaginations and they retain a bit of playfulness even as teenagers. Those qualities are the things that carry us through most days, no matter what the days hold. Delight, curiosity, creativity, imagination. These remain important to me in how I choose to move through this journey of life. While life can bring challenges and require serious moments from us, it is these kinds of moments that buoy us when life’s storms approach unexpectedly.
I love that my girls and I share these kinds of moments. In fact, the other day, for no real reason, I forwarded to my girls two photos of clouds I had snapped with my phone. As my husband and I took our evening walk, the clouds hovering over the mountains elicited an easy smile from me because immediately I saw mythical creatures hanging in the sky overhead and when we got back to the house, I knew I needed to share them with our girls. Without any context, I texted them the first photo and asked them what they saw. At first, my youngest wasn’t quite sure, but after I sent the second photo and when my 17 year old responded without hesitation that she saw dragons, my youngest quickly agreed that she saw a phat dragon.
We may be past the simple picture book phase of their lives, but I love that we are not past the desire to look up at the clouds and find shapes and animals. There is a simple delight in such activities. Like looking up at the night sky to look for shooting stars or heading out at dusk to catch fireflies in their hands. I love that they have not outgrown such simple pleasures and it is my hope that no matter where this life may take them they will always take time to look up at the clouds and recall the many, many times we read books like Sector 7, sought out shooting stars in the night sky, and enjoyed the shifting shapes of billowing clouds. May they, like me, look fondly upon these shared moments knowing even if we didn’t all see the same things in the clouds, we were at least looking in the same direction.