It’s gonna be disgusting today.

The temperature is expected to crack 100, which wouldn’t be that bad, if the air wasn’t wringing wet. Even at 9:30, stepping outside is like being smacked in the lungs with a hot towel.

The sky over Minnesota was a watery sky. It had a peculiar tendency to try to sneak green into the acceptable palette of sky, and you’d get storms the color of absinthe, and muted sunsets where orange slunk into green into blue into night; wavery, hesitant sunsets rendered in watercolor, flecked with bats and puddling up around the occasional heron. Every now and then you’d get a sky full of clouds that looked completely off, long banks of blue egg carton foam and absurdly crisp gradients in teal and cornflower, the sort of clouds that makes you think the artist just got Photoshop.

The sky over Arizona was hard. It was a sky where water vapor feared to tread, and it was hard, the sort of brittle, glittering sky that you ought to be able to rap with your knuckles, and shatter into a razor-edged mosaic. You’d need stitches after messing with that sky.

The sky here is not hard. Even when it’s clear, like today, there is an odd, fibrous quality to it, the haze playing hell with the specularity, so that half the sky has a creeping, airbrushed paleness. If you hit this sky, it would give a bit, and spring back, and you’d come away with damp bits of blue clinging to your hand. It’s that sort of sky.