Clouds

27 August 2024
Rachel and I are sitting by the fire ring in the backyard, watching the clouds unfold above us. They come in slowly, a blanket of gray that frames erupting mounds of water droplets and ice crystals, smoldering in the setting sun, the color and intensity of glowing embers. Beyond that, a cloud churns, starkly white, growing from within as air currents cycle within, the heat of the day rising and driving some engine of cloud-making like we have never seen before. The optics elude me: how is one cloud illuminated white, while the other burns yellow? Perhaps the setting sun casts light through one cloud, reflects against another, is shaded by a third. Everything is in motion, three cloud layers against the evening sky, like a juggler’s trick.

I watch a single lobe of the white cloud, the smallest one I can see, a pimple extruded into a swelling tumor. How big is this thing a mile above my head, potentially growing to miles in thickness? How big is the smallest plume I can discern? Ten feet in diameter? 100? Behind the clouds, the sky is Arctic blue. This is what atmosphere looks like on Earth at its best, our blessed cocktail of nitrogen and oxygen, carbon dioxide and argon, water vapor that has not yet coalesced into clouds, plus the lesser gases and particulates that settle in the crevices of the leaves and our lungs, that feed or clog, enable or hamper life, warm the earth.

The wind picks at the placket of my shirt and slips inside. After a stifling day—I stepped outside this afternoon, and my glasses immediately fogged up—the wind feels wonderful. Lightning fires off to the south; in 15 seconds the thunder reaches me. A cicada lands in the plum tree and squeals in pulses for a minute. His call tails off, then he tears out of the tree only to collide with the garage. I look over just in time to watch him bounce off and fly away. Do cicadas remember such moments?

Rachel’s sunflowers have grown to the tops of the windows. The pear tree I topped a decade ago is heavy with fruit. Some has fallen to the ground where it is perforated by wasps or ground down by squirrels. Most is still hanging on the tree.

I reread a few lines from the Epic of Gilgamesh. These lines, from what we today call a prologue—what would this have been called in Akkadian?—were added as an opener to the book 500 years after the Babylonian version was written down, then translated 3200 years later by Stephen Mitchell:

Climb the stone staircase, more ancient than the mind can imagine,
approach the Eanna Temple, sacred to Ishtar,
a temple that no king has equaled in size or beauty,
walk on the wall of Uruk.
…
Find the cornerstone and under it the copper box
that is marked with his name. Unlock it. Open the lid.
Take out the tablet of lapis lazuli. Read
how Gilgamesh suffered all and accomplished all.

The sun is down and the clouds are all gray now, the lightning crackling in all directions. I head inside. We open the windows, let the descending atmosphere clear out the house. I write for a bit, and then the rain starts.