Significance
Lucy floated in the center of the ocean. It doesn’t matter which ocean. Use your imagination. That’s what Lucy does.
So she’s floating…in a row boat. No. She’s floating on a raft like the kind Tom Sawyer made with rough logs strewn together with twine.
Above her is sky. Clear. Blue. One thin cloud lingers in the far right region—if the sky had regions, which it doesn’t. No matter, Lucy thinks it’s beautiful. While her hand trails the water, she thinks of nothing else but that thin wisp of cloud in the far right corner of the sky. If Lucy had her paintbrushes right now, she’d paint that cloud. It would be larger in her painting. More significant.
Lucy’s never understood why people say small things don’t hold as much value as large things.
Puppies are cute but not to be taken as seriously as a large pit bull behind a chainlink fence. Okay, that one makes sense. But just because something can’t get at you, bite you, scare you, doesn’t mean it’s insignificant.
It’s possible that a small puppy could bite your finger, and it could hurt. If you were a baby, a puppy nipping your finger would be like a lion. That’s significant.
Lucy closed her eyes and imagined a puppy-shaped cloud in the sky. She imagined it so fiercely and with such detail that when she opened her eyes, the small wisp of cloud in the far right region was gone. In its place was not just one puppy-shaped cloud but hundreds.
They were frolicking not just in the far right region but across the entire clear blue sky. Lucy laughed. Did she do that?
A pop of thunder rattled the air. The next minute, sheets of rain poured onto the vast ocean and onto Lucy who was floating in the center of it.
Now you see why it doesn’t matter which ocean Lucy was floating in because that’s not what’s significant.
Lucy never thought she could create a kennel of puppy-shaped clouds that would rain down on her while she floated in the center of this vast ocean. But she did.
*Most things will never happen, but this one did.
*With acknowledgement to Philip Larkin