The Cloud Painter of Mount Wattle

A story about noticing beauty in the ordinary sky.

High on Mount Wattle, there was a little house with a blue door. In it lived an old man named Mr Alder, who painted the sky. At least, that is what the children in the town below believed.

Every morning, just before sunrise, they saw the clouds turn pink and gold. “Mr Alder is painting again,” they whispered. Bea was eight years old, and she was curious. One morning, she climbed the mountain to find out.

She knocked on the blue door. Mr Alder opened it, wearing a cardigan with a paint stain on the sleeve. “Hello,” said Bea. “Do you paint the clouds?” The old man laughed. “Come inside, and I will tell you a secret.”

He sat her at a table by the window, and gave her a mug of warm milk. “I do not paint the clouds,” he said. “The sun does that. But I paint what I see, every single day. Come and look.”

Out of the window, the sky was a soft grey. Slowly, a thin line of gold crept over the hills. It touched the edge of a cloud, and the cloud turned pink, then orange, then glowing red. Bea’s mouth fell open.

“Every morning is different,” said Mr Alder. “Sometimes the clouds are fat and woolly. Sometimes they are long and thin. I paint them so that I remember each one.” He showed her a stack of small paintings, a hundred or more.

He gave Bea a brush and a little tray of paints. “Try it,” he said. She painted the sky in streaks of rose and gold. It did not look quite like the real thing, but it looked like what she felt.

When she walked home, Bea saw the town with new eyes. The roofs were shining, and the clouds were purple at the edges. She began to paint a small picture every morning, and the walls of her room filled up with the sky.

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