![\"vapors\"](\"http:\/\/www.therowboat.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/06\/vapors.jpg\" "\\"vapors\\"")
<\/p>\nWhen I got home, when I got the camera, when I jumped out onto the fire escape to take a picture, it looked like this. This is all that was left.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
But only minutes before, as I rode along Wythe Avenue from Williamsburg to Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, and then most of all just after turning onto Dekalb\u2014 See the little bulbous shapes down at the bottom-center, right next to the building? Well, just before I got into my building to run up the five flights of stairs carrying my bike on my shoulder, in that exact spot, there was a beautiful field of mammatus clouds\u2014so named because they resemble the shape of a woman’s breast. The sun was setting, its orange light slipping under the dark cumulonimbus that had just delivered a thunderstorm, illuminating the space between the earth and its cloudy ceiling.<\/p>\n
Mammatus clouds are the strangest things, rare as precious rocks. The only other time I remember seeing them was during the summer I spend driving around the West with my book of clouds, looking for every new variety I could find. Here’s a picture from Wikipedia<\/a>. Pretty close. But not the surrounding mystery of the city.<\/p>\n Why do you slip away before I can trap you, you little animal? Nobody else saw you. Will they even believe me that I did? It was only you, and me, and the moments of life that disappear the instant they happen, leaving us passing things to wonder whether they (the moments) are enough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I got home, when I got the camera, when I jumped out onto the fire escape to take a picture, it looked like this. This is all that was left.<\/p>\n But only minutes before, as I rode along Wythe Avenue from Williamsburg to Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, and then most of all just after turning onto Dekalb\u2014 See the little bulbous shapes down at the bottom-center, right next to the building? Well, just before I got into my building to run up the five flights of stairs carrying my bike on my shoulder, in that exact spot, there was a beautiful field of mammatus clouds\u2014so named because they resemble the shape of a woman’s breast. The sun was setting, its orange light slipping under the dark cumulonimbus that had just delivered a thunderstorm, illuminating the space between the earth and its cloudy ceiling.<\/p>\n Mammatus clouds are the strangest things, rare as precious rocks. The only other time I remember seeing them was during the summer I spend driving around the West with my book of clouds, looking for every new variety I could find. Here’s a picture from Wikipedia<\/a>. Pretty close. But not the surrounding mystery of the city.<\/p>\n Why do you slip away before I can trap you, you little animal? Nobody else saw you. Will they even believe me that I did? It was only you, and me, and the moments of life that disappear the instant they happen, leaving us passing things to wonder whether they (the moments) are enough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[90,87,19,31],"class_list":["post-1107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-artifacts","tag-memory","tag-metaphor","tag-new-york-city"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1107"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1107\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1111,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1107\/revisions\/1111"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/4\/48\/Mammatus_Clouds.png\" "\\"Mammatus")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n