::ABREAST::

Tuesday night treated Dallas to an amazing show of mammatus clouds. As I bounded down the huge staircase in front of the museum, the sky, to couch it in Mardi Gras terms, asked me for some beads.

Mammatus clouds are round, dangling cloud formations, and that evening they baskingly caught the setting sunlight. They looked like the inside of a white balloon must look when someone grips it in one hand. They looked like sno cone domes stuck to the cloudy roof. They looked too sharply defined to be cotton, too fuzzy to be marble. They looked like unpainted styrofoam planets.

I sat out on my roof for a while, taking in the rare meteorological sight. It was a delightfully unframed experience, being outside the window. I saw a plane streak by, and I thought about how amazing this had to have looked to its passengers.

Later, they became less smooth, acquiring an almost cauliflower-like texture, similar to this, and the fissures became blurred, the sky's breasts veiled in a flimsy sheer balconette bra.

The thunderhead drifted slowly to the east, and as I noted this, a Mobile Mammography truck passed by; I giggled at the synchronicity.

The eastward motion was the exact opposite of Stabbing Westward. It was slinking eastward.