Today I observed something I had completely forgotten….watching a cloud form.
When I was a child I would watch the clouds all the time. Lying on my back in the grass, or on the sand (keep it clean, cheap seats!) …or on a lilo floating in the sea…or in the evening on the garden wall, or the hood of my parent’s car. Watching clouds and the shapes they made.
Later in my teens I would stay out even when the sun went down, watching the stars instead. Usually in the summer of course, when Scorpio is visible in the Northern Hemisphere. I’m a Scorpio and I loved being able to pick it out and as the summer passed, watch it move from one horizon to the other.
I still love looking up at the sky at night and gazing at the Milky Way, the Big and Little Dipper…and my Scorpion.
And clouds have continued to fascinate me as well but I have focussed on it differently as I got older. I love to photograph clouds now. Wispy horsetails, funky shapes, brightly-glowing-sunset-painted, heavy-rain-filled-squall….clouds.
This morning I stepped outside the office for a cigarette and looked up to see a large cloud hanging over Hamilton. It caught my interest because it was darkly and heavily bottomed and I hoped it might deposit its load before moving away from the island. Had I mentioned before that we’re in a bit of a drought? Yes? Oh, okay.
And then my eye was caught by a fragile patchy little mesh of cloud nearby the big one. I was trying to figure out its shape, what it might be, but it was changing too much. Frustrating. Until…until I realised it was also billowing…blossoming and blooming under (well, OK, above) my very eye. It has been years since I witnessed this.
It was very nearly right above me as we are not far out of the City, but not so much that I had to crane my neck too hard to watch…and watch I did. That tiny little patchy near-nothing began to pull previously invisible wisps into it, became more solidly white, starting to billow like smoke out of a stack, expanding as if someone was blowing it up like some oddly shaped, marshmallowy balloon. When it got to about half the size of the original cloud it started to shadow around the bottom, and as it grew so did the shadow.
By the time I was ready to go back inside it had surpassed the first cloud in size!
I had forgotten the wonder of watching a cloud be born and every time I stepped outside again today (ahem) I scanned the sky hoping for another opportunity. Sadly, the sky remained its clear, blue self, apart from the now two huge clouds hanging over Hamilton.

If I believed in ‘God’ maybe I would be accrediting this miracle to him. But I don’t.
I sure do give Mother Nature a pat on the back for it though.

And, no, it did not rain. That’s why Mother Nature only gets a pat and not a high-five.