Summer is a time to sit in your yard or beside a trickling stream, and watch … drifting clouds. In our money-obsessed culture, cloud-watching is ridiculed. In school we learn about the earth, not the sky. Maybe one day in twelve years is devoted to a description of clouds, and even that’s not very useful. Terms like “stratocumulus” and “cirrostratus” don’t capture the romance of floating islands in the sky.

That’s why you need this handy guide to cloud-appreciation.

The easiest way to describe a cloud is by analogy. One cloudlet looks like a shopping cart, another like the head of a rhinoceros. Some clouds clearly have faces, and it’s obvious if they’re frowning or smiling – or staring blankly. The items in our daily lives that clouds resemble are:pillows, mattresses, balled-up tissues,

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