Flying over west Texas. The clouds are slightly squared dollops arranged in smart, square rows. But the rows are out of square with the ranks and blocks of drill pads for gas wells that mark the dark green land below. The pads are squares of sand-colored earth with small dark dots near the center. They seem more densely packed than I have ever seen them. And I see them every time I fly East.

Before the west Texas gas wells was a denser layer of clouds that obscured my view, but a little earlier still, maybe in Eastern New Mexico, I saw open, dry desert that was randomly packed with odd little bumps that looked soft and fuzzy, like misshapen velour toys. Amid these little bumps was what looked like a dried patch of tar, large enough to cover a few square miles, dark and hardened under a heavy dusting from years out on hot, dry land. There was also a bit of trompe-l’oeil — only what the trompe was, or what the reality was was not clear to me. Was it a large sinkhole with very steep sides and light-colored spot in the low drainage at the middle? Or was it a small butte, steep-sided with a light-colored patch on top? I felt like reaching down and feeling the softness of the velour-covered bumps. But I quickly narrowed in on the visual trick, trying to decide for sure, which way it was. I leaned toward the sinkhole in the end.

The clouds move in and cover over the oak hills below. In the low spread of downy white, thin clouds. I imagine my Mom, floating, shrunken, old, as she is — a respirator tube in her mouth, and otherwise eyes closed. Lost in another world? Or is she just gone? Will her eyes ever open again? Will she ever speak her willful mind, as she has all my life? Will she tell her stories of her days in the Army during World War II, or recount the genealogy of her side of the family? She floats awkwardly there in that cloud. What do I really know of this world? All my rich knowledge useless now.