Clouds
 
Ever think back to the things you used to do as a kid? Like, build forts out of sofa cushions. Pull your sister’s hair. Eat paste. Sometimes it’s good to revisit those things when you’re older.  Not as a lifestyle change (don’t worry; I’m not going to be cooking up a paste soufflé), but just as a way to bring back a little of the fun and the wonder from childhood. For example: cloud watching.
 
Recently a friend of mine pointed out a rhesus monkey in the sky. I was mid-sentence at the time, driving my car down the highway, and I was alarmed that my out-of-town visitor suddenly insisted that he was seeing fauna that I had never personally seen in Texas. It took me a moment to realize that he was looking at the sky, not at the roadside, where an oddly-shaped cloud was playing with his imagination.
 
That started it - the game was on. The rest of the time that my friend was in town, we had cloud-shape contests. It was a whimsical blast from my childhood, and it didn’t stop after my buddy left Austin. Now I EVERY time I look at the sky, I see fanciful objects. Last week alone, while on my evening commute, I spotted a sea turtle, a birthday cake, a jellyfish, a clown’s face, and a pig being shot out of a cannon (it was ok, he was wearing a helmet). What I saw far less of was the maniac Texas drivers on their commutes home. And that was a nice change. Kept the blood pressure down. (I bet many more people would benefit from this, actually.)
 
So, as I noticed how cloud-watching changed my mood, I began thinking – have you ever realized how the sky affects the personality of a native people? Really. For example, the sky in Texas is BIG. It just is. I have yet to hear a scientific explanation of why this optical illusion occurs, but nonetheless, it’s here, and it’s the biggest, widest, broadest sky you’ve ever seen*. So the egos in Texas are also big (and the belt buckles, and the hats… you get the idea.) When you think about it, it’s not really that surprising that the people down here have a feeling of invincibility when their sky is so damn untouchable. Then take the clouds in Ohio…first of all, they’re omnipresent, so you get this vague feeling that someone is always watching you. Maybe they’re not actively following you around and looking at you through binoculars, but still, they’re there and you can’t shake them - like an annoying houseguest that stays and stays... Secondly, Ohio clouds are always the low, gray-blanket variety that Mom Nature unrolls in September and uses as a comforter over the entire population of the state until late June. (We know you want us to be warm, Mom, but frankly your comforter doesn’t help much, and all of this gray just makes everyone depressed for nine months out of the year.) So does that mean Ohio’s residents are paranoid and depressed? Well… something like that.
 
At this point any self-respecting Ohioan is going to get defensive.  “Hey, our weather ain’t so bad. Why don’t you pick on those Seattle folks? They’ve always got rain, and they’re depressed, too!” I gotta tell ya, folks - sure, Washington state is constantly cloudy - but after having been in Seattle’s java-loving cloudiness, I must say that there is a distinct difference. See, in Washington, you’re hanging out with the mountains. It’s cloudy because you’re up IN the clouds. You’re walking among them. You’re all moving along together up in the sky, near the peaks. You just don’t feel like you’re being squished down under a blanket like you do in Ohio. Most of the people in Washington state are pretty darn cheerful compared to Ohioans. No offense, guys; but the Seattle folks who popularized being depressed did it because they had nothing better to do, and were rising to an immature dare to make dirty flannel shirts popular.
 
The clouds that populate New York state are impossibly high (why is it that everything in New York seems to be really, really tall?). No wonder that New Yorkers tend to look down on the rest of us. The clouds in southern California are ditzy. They come in off of the Pacific and then forget to be much of a presence. They’ll sit for a little while and look around, cruising the scene; but pretty soon they’ll get bored and move on to the next happening thing. Florida’s clouds are controlled by the theme parks and take whatever shape Disney tells them to take that day. They also have a short attention span, like the children (and parents) who flock there: they’ll be threatening rain at 10am, suddenly downpour at 10:15, clear up at about 10:30, and will be on the other side of the world by 11am. They’ve got to be at EuroDisney by the afternoon, you see.  They’re on a schedule.
 
And me, I’ve got to get back to cloud watching. It’s a perfect afternoon for it: the sun is shining, the wind is blowing, the sky is bright blue and specked with puffy white cumulus…and I think I just saw a rhesus monkey fly past my window. Excuse me.

*I’m told that there is a similar phenom that occurs in they skies of Montana. (It is, after all, “Big Sky Country.”  However, I have never been there to experience it.  So I’m sticking to my guns.
 


Laura Goodman is a regular author for the footnote. She will occasionally make us kneel before her and address her as "Queen of the May."