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.
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."