"America's Next Top Cumulonimbus"

Moonrise over Warwick Neck and Narragansett Bay, August 10, 2011

What I missed most during our decades in the city were big skies. I wanted to see the sun coming up in the morning and setting in the evening, as we had during our years in Little Compton. I longed to be a spectator at nature's cloud shows – not just staring straight up between buildings and trees at fragments of white and blue and gray, but taking in the awesome sweep of incoming fronts, squall lines, and tumbling cumulonimbus.

We moved to our bayside location four summers ago, and I've been like a drunk at at a frat party: greedily inhaling the sky shows with my eyes and, really, my whole being. This blog was born of my compulsive need to record sunsets in particular but also other sky and cloud phenomena. Something's always happening up there! And we get to see it all, from sunrise and moonrise over Warwick Neck to scary storm systems overhead to painterly sunsets. Edna St. Vincent Millay spoke for me in her poem, "God's World" (1917):

O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
Thy mists, that roll and rise! …
Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart…

Several evenings ago, a gloriously threatening line of thunderheads (above) began bundling together just north of us. The largest one was blown into a characteristic flat-topped anvil by high-altitude winds. Out on the beach path with Yogi, I followed these billowing wonders with my camera.

Thunderheads loom over our neighbors Tom and Karen's house.

We did not, after all, get the storm (it struck farther north) – a pattern fairly typical here, possibly because warm air rising over Narragansett Bay forms a barrier to weak incoming fronts. Instead, we watched a runway show of whipped-cream cumulus models strutting their stuff, shaking a platinum mane as if to say, "We've got your number."

Prisms and rays

An intense pop-up thundershower raced through Warwick from the northwest, leaving beauty in its wake – including this rainbow over Warwick Neck. Wave "hi" to the moon.

Sunset over Oakland Beach (above and, shortly afterward, below).

Bye, bye, birdies. A little girl had just run down the beach, waving her hands and yelling happily at the gulls.

Later, receding thunderheads reflect the red setting sun.

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