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Castles in the air

I don't get anything done after work this time of year until after nightfall because the stoop is so endlessly entertaining. I was still thinking about the birds today, and a whole little flock of them flew into the birch tree and called me outside just in time to see the most amazing sky tonight.

It started with this flat gray cloud cover in the west that broke into a tiny clear corner filled with a one big puffy sunlit cumulus cloud to the extreme east. It didn't last long. The winds aloft were moving fast and the sky changed quickly into a wash of varying shades of gray. A huge cloud built due northeast, but it was almost translucent, billowing into a glass mountain of smoky quartz that was intermittently illuminated by tiny pulsing threads of pink lightning, like veins of light from somewhere far away. A great heron with ridiculously long legs flew across the length of the horizon.

It felt like watching a fairy tale erupt in the sky.