Once upon a time, in a magical place known as Skyland, a little cloud named Lola woke up feeling quite gloomy. Outside her home, she could hear the soft sounds of the wind and see the tiny raindrops as they floated by. She peeked out her window and saw all the clouds overhead—so many of them!—but they were all sad and gray.
“Oh dear,” said Lola to herself, “It looks like it’s going to be a cloudy day. I just know my day will be long and boring, without any fun at all.” And with that, she lay once again to think about it. But after a little while, she decided to get up.
“Good morning, every one of you,” she said very politely to the clouds above her. “Won’t you come around and be my friends? I’m Lola, and I want to see if we can’t have some fun today. It will be so much nicer if we are all together.”
But the clouds made no reply; they just passed along in their dreary way, without looking this way or that. Lola was very much disappointed, and began to think that she was the only happy little thing in all the great big sky. But after a while something wonderful happened! It began to pour and rain.
Then Lola felt wet and cold, so she wished very much that she could get down out of the sky. Just as she was peeping over the edge of the large cloud, who should pass by below her but Rosie the Raindrop.
“Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!” cried Rosie as she rushed past.
Lola shivered. “Oh dear!” she said. “It’s dreadful to think that this summer morning has turned into such a cold and dismal day! But how is it that you are in such a hurry, Jimmy Raindrop?”
Jimmy grinned. “They say I moved so fast that you can’t see me,” he laughed, and hopped, skipped and jumped right down till he landed on a flower far below.
Lola was sorry to see him go; but then, thought she, “If the rain is going to fall so hard, I’m afraid I’ll have to keep out of the way.” Just then she noticed something else below here. It was a little bluebird flying over her, looking and listening everywhere. But being so young, she forgot that it was looking for rain when it kept trilling so hard.
“Oh, Lola-oh, Lola, come hither, come hither, come hither,” sang the little bluebird.
“It’s no use,” cried the cloud. “There isn’t any blue watchman this time.”
“Then it’s rainy weather, rainy weather, rainy weather,” said the bluebird proudly, tumbling over and over again in his glee.
What happened next? Well, you just stay in that flower of yours, unless you know what snowflakes are, and I’ll tell you all about it.
“I flew through this way, when suddenly there came the muffled sound of a large cloud, and huddled inside of six or eight other clouds a foundation began to tumble down one on top of another. ‘That strange-tasting rain you are getting,’ it said, ‘you will find, on tasting, that it is part fresh, sweet-water. So of course you poor mortals there below had water sprinkled on your thirsty soil. Here you go terribly, and do you don’t know what a delight they’ve given those poor birds that you have been tossing all day long in your treetops? Go away, Drew, about all these things! See those clouds take the heaviest cyan on this side of the sun, wool planting flowers, bons-bais, and posies, and it will do me good to keep on watching their rain. You see we want to have about three weeks of rain; and it’s awful fatiguing work without feeling all the time as those poor clouds do there in distress, and with no pleasure outside of what we give us joys. Then it begins to rain. It was one thing to enjoy it all by yourself, or when a little bird hopped over it, and sang or played the harp. But it was plenty for everybody to feel as happy as though a million suns had come out at once. Then the clouds began to cry, and sing, and hum to themselves till they became quite quiet. And oh! how the sunshine, and the birds, and the flowers, rejoiced and said that nature with all she had to give did seem to love her very best on that sunshine-and-shooting-star rainy day!”
This was the way our little feather slowly crept the top-top, climbing blossom of a snow-plummet. They say that as the frost and snow come down from the ether they go on growing, and growing, till when they get to the earth you can’t tell what kind of a sizable lump they formerly were on the top!
Later in the summer the earth sometimes broke a snow or ice on it from without a house. Well, it was only to get everybody up, and to bury the big, heavy sleighs of toy labor-songwriter in till everybody was asleep, and not to find anybody’s anybody anywhere without a snow of snow about them. And that is how all the little clouds and everybody of ours will look and act before a fiend of time shall separate and then return to his Star Palaces.
So Lola learned that even a cloudy day could bring happiness and surprises; it just depended on how you looked at it. Every day can hold something special. All you need is the right pair of eyes, and perhaps a friend to remind you of the joy in little things.