Eclectic Emma: May 2012

Hello! Have any of you ever read Megan McDonald's 'Sisters Club' series? I have and I love it! I have been reading it to Anna at night and we just finished and I had to share it with someone else! You'll listen, right? ;)
So, I'll post maybe 1 or two chapters a week. Here we go!

Cloudy with a Chance of Boys.
Under the Mackerel Sky.

I used to think weather was boring.
Something old people talk about to fill an empty room with conversation. Just look at my nana and papa-they're permanently tuned to the Weather Channel. Weather was one of those things I never really paid attention to. That was before. Before the lights went out during the Storm of the Century. Before the frogs appeared. Before I got my first detention. Before the tsunami. But that comes later. I guess you could say that I have weather on the brain these days. We're doing a serious weather unit in Earth Science, and I'm like a semi-cloud expert now. I've spent a lot of time watching clouds from the third-story attic window of our crooked old Victorian. Some days I climb up Reindeer Hill to observe clouds and look for unusual cloud shapes. Then, I take pictures to document them. I'm making a cloud chart, which is like a mega-poster filled with cool photos of all kinds of clouds-cumulus,cirrus. At first, it was just a school project I had to do to get a decent grade. But the more I watched, the more I began to think clouds have...personalities. One minute they look like happy puffs of cotton candy-marshmallow castles in the air. Then you blink, and right before your eyes that same cloud has morphed into a snake or a dragon. Come to think of it, clouds are like sisters. I should know. I have two of them-Alex, my older sister, and Joey, who's two years younger than me. Alex, I would say, is a thunderhead:dark and mysterious, quick to anger, as if there's a storm gathering inside her. Joey is a cumulus:a happy cloud that comes out on a bright, blue-sky day and looks like a bunny wearing fuzzy bedroom slippers. Me, I'm more of a cirro-stratus, what the science books call "uniform clouds, hardly discernible, capable of forming halos." They look like light brushstrokes across the sky. You know, the even, steady kind. Always there, but sometimes you don't even notice. I never thought much about clouds, really, till now. Suddenly, they're everywhere. In Shakespeare, Hamlet looks at clouds and compares them to a camel, then a weasel, not to mention a whale. In Language Arts, a poem we studied by E.E.Cummings had a locomotive spouting violets, which I think must be clouds. There's even a local chapter of the Cloud Appreciation Society, right here in Acton, Oregon. They have a logo and everything. But the most important thing about clouds is that they give you a hint about what's to come. All you have to do is see the signs. Read the sky. Right after we started our weather unit, I noticed trees were leafing. Somewhere, frogs dreamed of hatching. Joey told me once that frogs can actually smell danger before they hatch. All I could smell was rain. And then, for three days, we were under a mackerel sky-a sky filled with cirro-cumulus and alto-cumulus clouds. Think buttermilk. Think thousands of tiny fish scales. A mackerel sky means three things: precipitation, instability, and thunderstorms. So, for all I know about weather, you'd think I would've seen it coming. I should have known something was about to happen. Something that would change me. Us. The sisters. You can smell rain. You can hear thunder coming. But there's not a weatherman on the planet who could have given me this forecast:cloudy, with a chance of boys.

Come back on Friday for the next chapter, 'Change in the Weather.'

Thanks for looking at my blog!

Emma.