#13 Caring for Mother Nature: Clouds

Greetings, readers. Today, we continue our series, Caring for Mother Nature, by my friend, the author and naturalist, Peggy Sias Lantz. (Click her name to go to her website.) This time, we consider those fluffy, puffy, floating entities called clouds.

Note: Just a reminder that these articles were first published in Peggy’s church’s newsletter. She’s graciously allowed me to re-publish them here. Sometimes she mentions her dear husband, Don, who passed away a few years ago. I feel lucky to have had the chance to meet him. I first met Peggy on a Rollins College Alumni trip to the Galapagos Islands in 2006. We’re both members of The Florida Writers Association and have written blog posts for them. Yay for writing-focused friendships.

Clouds

by Peggy Lantz

Florida’s skies are beautiful. Bright blue, amazing clouds with silver linings, gully-washing downpours, and sunsets. Don and I were/are both Floridians, but for eight years we had to live in Minnesota where skies were usually totally blue or totally overcast. I remember weeks when I never saw the sun except in a tiny crack at sunrise and another tiny crack at sunset.

But one day, out walking, Don looked up at a cloud formation and said, “Look! Like Florida!” Some years later, living again in Florida and again out walking, this time around Lake Lucy, Don said, “They weren’t, were they?” And I knew exactly what he was talking about.

Are any of you old enough to remember the old Billie Burke radio show with the theme song, “Look for the Silver Lining”? Billie closed her show every week by singing this song. “…when e’re a cloud appears in the blue, Remember somewhere the sun is shining …”

And the Highwaymen artists were superb at painting clouds with silver linings—dark billowing clouds with the sun behind them lighting the edges.

Those “silver lining” clouds are called cumulonimbus clouds.

Every science has its own lingo.

Medical doctors talk about aortas and gallbladders. Jewelers talk about karats; computer scientists talk about kilobytes; botanists talk about pedicels.

What is a cloud?

A cloud is simply a suspension of liquid or ice water droplets. Meteorologists talk about clouds in terms such as cumulus (from Latin meaning pile or heap), cirrus (thin, wispy clouds), stratus (low, gray drizzly clouds), and nimbus (rain). Then they combine the terms, such as nimbostratus, or add words that indicate how high above the ground the clouds are, such as altocirrus.

Cumulonimbus clouds are the ones that produce thunderstorms, lightning, and hail. And silver linings.

Many long years ago, I read a poem called “The Lilac Cloud” by George S. Galbraith. I want to share it with you.

I lack the vanity

To say God made that lilac cloud for me,

And the plum tree veiled in bloom,

And twilight’s tender gloom,

Fastened to heaven by one blazing star.

Not for my pleasure was the cricket wrought

And tuned and taught,

And mockingbirds perfected as they are.

Because I am not vain,

I say God made these things, and it is plain

They are but facets of His grand design.

But God made me as well,

With touch and eyes and ears and sense of smell,

With heart and brain, whose potencies combine

To make the cloud and all creation mine.

—END—

Thanks for reading!

Your writer on the wing,

Charlene

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