During the wondrous days of our childhood, my sister and I learned to find meaning in the intricate shapes of clouds. We saw upon the sky a shoe, a circus pony, our mother’s fly swatter, and as we rested in the freshly mown grass, our parents taught us to decipher each message: the shoe-cloud urged us to prepare for travel; the pony-cloud announced the makings of a celebration; the swatter-cloud discouraged misbehavior as well as the presence of blowflies in the summer. Our upbringing was one of both delight and instruction, though at times the messages also saddened and frightened us, and we reacted appropriately, as children ought to, clinging whenever we could to the legs of our parents. Often, to discourage such behavior, for our parents wished that we might develop independent of their own faults, our parents communicated with us from afar, our mother from the darkened cavern of her bedroom, our father from the silver gleam of his aircraft high above, and thus we grew up well-versed in the cloud as parental message.

Of course, we all of us owe our understanding of clouds to Luke Howard, a British chemist-turned-nephologist, whose skyward research helped clouds to gain prominence in modern culture as a legitimate force of change. Howard, in a presentation to the Askesian Society in 1802, declared, “It is by observing the transitions of cloud forms that the weather patterns of our very families might be predicted and further understood.” To which paper his father responded via cloud message: “Luke Howard, forgive me my earnest demands; they were certainly well-intended.”

Howard’s paper, “On the Modification of Clouds,” introduced a basic nomenclature, organizing the clouds into three categories: cirrus, stratus, cumulus. It was Howard’s contention, now generally accepted, that these formations, how they combined together and stacked one atop another, created familial messages by which a father might communicate with his son, a mother with her daughter, and, less frequently, a sister with her brother. Howard cited for evidence various of his childhood journals, which not only detailed in orderly fashion his daily observations of the clouds over his home, but also translated their formations into rudimentary English, an English betrayed by a childish misapprehension for the trappings of grammar and mechanics, but emotionally fraught nonetheless. These journals allowed Howard to better appreciate his father, a quiet, exacting man who expected Howard to support the family pharmacy, communicating as much by condensing moisture into the sky above their house. We believe that these journals, which are preserved in the Library at Friends’ House in London, are solely responsible for the founding of the Field of Cloud and Family Studies, and so we are deeply indebted to Luke Howard, his father, and their enigmatic relationship, despite however troubling it may have been.

Ryan Call lives in Houston with his wife. Excerpts from the ongoing field guide to North American weather have been published by mlpress, Lamination Colony, sleepingfish, Everyday Genius, NANO Fiction, and LIT.