Her mother looked up from her gardening. “It can’t. That’s a stratus cloud. It’s up too high, and not dense enough.”

“Oh. Well, what if it really wanted to make a thunderstorm?”

“It would have to be much, much thicker. It would have to be a cumulonimbus cloud. Cumulonimbi are very, very tall, and much lower in the sky. Now, what happens when it rains—just a normal rain shower, I mean—is that particles get caught in the clouds, so that all the water vapor condenses onto the particles, and that condensation adds enough weight to the particle that it falls from the sky, collecting more condensation on the way, and when it reaches us on earth, it’s a raindrop.”

“Grandfather told me raindrops are the angels’ tears of joy.”

“What have the angels got to be happy about? The earth is filled with war and famine. Now, what happens during a thunderstorm,” her mother continued (Vivian propped herself up on her elbows to look at her mother now, because suddenly this promised to get interesting), “a thunderstorm occurs when two air masses, called fronts, collide.”

“Collide?”

“Bang together.”

“Why are they called fronts?”

“I don’t know. Skip that.” Her mother picked up a trowel in one hand and a little rake in the other. “Now, imagine this one is a great big mass of hot air, like you get in summertime. This other one is cooler air. And they’re both going in different directions very fast, like this.” She brought the gardening tools together with a clang.

“So thunder is the sound of bunches of air hitting each other?”

“No. Well, sort of. Actually, it’s the sound of lightning.”

“Grandfather said thunder was the sound of Thor’s mighty hammer.”

“Let’s leave your grandfather out of this for the time being, shall we? Now, lightning is generated when—”

Vivian eased herself down onto her back again, looking up at the little wispy bits of clouds while her mother went on talking and waving the garden implements around. The clouds had moved a little bit in the last few minutes. One of them looked like a little man, waving. It was silly to call them stratus clouds. Each one was an individual, you could tell just by looking at them. She waved to the little cloud man. In her mind, she re-christened him from “Stratus” to “Ernie.”

“Attention, Ernie. Make me a thunderstorm,” she murmured.

Ernie waved back merrily.

Copyright 2008 Amy Frushour Kelly. All rights reserved.

Reproduction by any means prohibited without prior written consent.