Tears

        Great-Great Grandmother belonged to an Indian tribe out West.  It is said that when she was sad, she would wipe her tears away with nearby clouds.  When the clouds were tear-filled, she would release them to carry her tears to Midwest farms in the form of mild, summer rains. 

        When Great-Great Grandmother had angry tears, caused by her drunken husband or foolish children, the clouds that were filled with these tears sometimes spawned tornadoes. 

        Great-Great Grandmother regretted the death and destruction caused by her anger, but knew it was not her place to break the cycle.

Evening Fog: A metaphorical tale

        Night was falling fast when Evening Fog drifted in. He was a prisoner of the wind and the blazing heat of the afternoon. His eyes were the color of denim blue skies, but you could see he was haunted by a deepening gloom.

        The smell of things both living and dead mixed in the air, and thunder scattered crows from a nearby tree. And there was Evening Fog, hot and dusty, silently ushering evening into the lonely desert.

Young Clayton Cloud

        Young Clayton Cloud was BORED out of his mind making the usual cloud formations: faces, animals, monuments, flowers, zodiac signs, mythological gods. 

        If he had to “make” something, he wanted it to be art, and modern art at that.

        Clayton wanted to be Claes Oldenburg, or Henry Moore, or Robert Holmes. And if a flower, then an O’Keeffe flower; if a face, then a Cezanne face. 

        At the very least, he would be a Jim Dine robe.

Foghorn

        There aren’t many things clouds despise, but the foghorn is one of them.  To clouds it appears as if man is attempting to take “the view from those who have as much right to it” as anyone else. 

        A five-second, deep throated blast every half minute throughout the night!  Such arrogance from such late-comers.  Even before man crawled onto land, clouds were hovering around the coastlines of the world.

        And the loneliness in those long, repeated groans:  salt-faced men off deadly shoals, head--lands, and outcrops of rock; worried wives and daughters; sons yearning to sail off to false dreams.

Cloud Terrorist

            For all the crap we daily pump into the atmosphere, civilization is faced with yet another terrorist:  the cloud terrorist.

            Looking very innocent with a calm appearance, it descends and engulfs the upper floors of skyscrapers.

            Once most of a building is nothing more than a bank of white--in movement so imperceptible as to make icebergs envious--the  cloud terrorist floats away with the upper floors snuggly concealed within its white mass.

            Reports of widespread arrests of suspected clouds are beginning to emerge, but government officials refuse to confirm anything.