The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still,—and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one’s feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!

– Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

And happy birthday, Tom Waits.

Well things are pretty lousy for a calendar girl

The boys just dive right off the cars and splash into the street

And when they’re on a roll she pulls a razor from her boot

And a thousand pigeons fall around her feet

So put a candle in the window and a kiss upon his lips

As the dish outside the window fills with rain

Just like a stranger with the weeds in your heart

And pay the fiddler off ’til I come back again

– Tom Waits, Time