“The cure for loneliness is solitude.” -Marianne Moore

This week I finished my NASA GLOBE Cloud observation training and collected my first data. Each day I get a text telling me the time of day a NASA satellite is passing overhead. Within a half hour window, I document the types of clouds I see, based on shape, height, and whether they are producing rain or snow. The next day NASA computer sends me feedback on how close my observation and the satellite observations are. The Satellites have their names- Terra, Aqua. Already I’m attributing them different personalities, Terra being more conservative than Aqua in the qualitative description of the amount of clouds. It is satisfying to see that what I see and what the satellites see are pretty close. Ideally I would be on an open field or park, but we are on a stay at home order, so instead my observations come from our 20th floor apartment lanai (South and East) and the view from our front door (North). Since I started, D. and I have had discussions about what is a cloud, and really what is a satellite? You think living on this world for so many years I would know about clouds and satellites, but I had to study and take notes in the training in order to pass. Now I sit on the lanai watching the clouds blow pass, like a solitary lighthouse keeper counting the ships that pass on their way to the next harbor. There is something not-dystopian about living through this pandemic in Honolulu. In my film and literary experience of dystopian futures, there are generally no clouds. Instead, there seems to always be a grey mass of low hanging gunmetal pulp and steady rain. In a dystopian novel, there is no blue sky to provide a backdrop to condensed vapor shattering the light so that the wind can puff if up into the shape of a chicken, or dragon, or that the sunset can tear it apart into pink cotton candy. In our pandemic, at least here, there are no storm-troopers, just cops prowling the parks in their white and blue cars, flashing lights and yelling at the lady feeding the pigeons under the monkeypod tree or the dog-walkers stopping to chat. Most days the weatherman says its partly sunny. Some days its partly cloudy. When I do dream, its about being in a crowded restaurants, without a mask. I am scared and thrilled. Each day we get a virus count and a death count. Each day the counts are higher. Twice a day the satellites pass over. I upload my cloud data.