We have a wonderful book on our windowsill called The Cloudspotter’s Guide: The Science, History, and Culture of Clouds by Gavin Pretor-Pinney. It is so far one of the most useful explorations of clouds that I’ve seen. The first chapter covers cumulus clouds, and I was taken with the scale of them. For perspective, I decided to find a way to compare the size of an average cumulus cloud with something else familiar- the length of a human life (if you assume that you’ll live to be 100 years old). Here is the haiku I wrote to make sense of the scale of these things:

in one cloud there are

one billion times the drops

as seconds in your life