Where Clouds Are Born

I am attending a week of training at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Yesterday, after eating dinner a few blocks off campus, four of us walked Huron Street back to our hotel during a rainstorm. Here, the rain falls straight down to the streets and buildings, steady and warm. As we walked, the people and small birds that perpetually fill the sidewalks, drew back under the canopy of either storefronts or trees. Above an old stone church, we saw a single cloud, much lower than the others, slowly spinning and tightening into a ball, pure white under the bruised underbelly of the stormfront. This low, treed place, pinched between Lake Huron and Lake Erie, just at the high and jumbled Rocky Mountain Front, is a place where clouds are born.

--Mitchell Hegman