By Charles M. Sumid     Copyright 2025     Written 2025

We saw it from the parking lot—
the lenticular cloud hung motionless above the summit,
perfectly circular, impossibly still.

A flying saucer made of weather.

Someone said “Is that real?”
as if beauty required verification,
as if physics couldn’t be this generous.

It was only moisture meeting altitude.
Only air performing its radiant work.

But only.

The storm was so local we could see its edges—
that small disc of snow falling on the peak alone
while we stood in sun.

The mountain had entered different weather.

Around me, strangers gathered.
Phones raised, voices hushed.
“Have you ever—?”
“Look, it’s snowing up there.”

For fifteen minutes, maybe twenty,
we were a congregation without doctrine,
bound by the privilege of witnessing
something rare enough to stop us,
ordinary enough to be true.

The cloud moved eventually.

The summit emerged, snow-bright, transformed.

And the cloud drifted on to hang above some other peak,
to gift some other parking lot this brief,
impossible,
perfectly natural benediction.

We carry it with us now.

Not the explanation—
moisture, altitude, the physics we could google—
but the moment we looked up together
and the world was exactly as mysterious
as it needed to be.