Earlier this week, hail and sleet battered our neighborhood for 10 minutes — just enough time for my middle son and me to hustle a heavy pot of marigolds and some morning glories climbing a decommissioned antique lampstand from the front lawn to the front porch.

During our brief flower rescue operation, icy marbles pinged our heads. Sleet soaked our clothes. We felt pelted, cold, and hunched — hardly in the mood to reflect on the anatomy of a cloud.

However, on another day this week, a cloud still filling as a massive water tanker rose against one of Colorado’s classic cornflower blue ceilings.

Instead of throwing us into a panic to save the potted flowers in the front and pray for the peppers, tomatoes, beans and melons to make it in the backyard garden, we just stopped.

Even better, we stopped to look up — to take some time to think expansively instead of reflexively or practically.

How refreshing!

Instead of carrying on as pedestrians with a destination, we paused before this glorious cloud to ponder.

A good question came to mind in those moments: Why do I usually live in such a practical, plodding way with the natural world always on display with guaranteed free delivery?

Our friend along for our family walk after dinner then noticed the bright white cotton candy cloud with a golden tint in the day’s last light.

Then, we together tilted our heads back with our hands on our hips to take turns imagining aloud what it looked like.

Some saw a bear heading up a mountain. Meanwhile, I spotted the Loch Ness Monster surfacing and looking back at one of its humps — a mysterious serpent-like creature moving in and out of two different elemental mediums.

Ultimately, this cloud also seemed to me like a fluffy form of the stylized iconic Japanese technique used to paint big waves — a genre called Ukiyo-e art that translates in English to mean “picture of the floating world.”

In that world, a mounting wave or waves and any related splash seem suspended as together they face their unfurling — the unfurling that would force them to surrender their magnificent form and disappear in the ocean.

For the landlocked, the fleeting formations of water and air in clouds above follow the same cycle of the waves — rise, release, repeat.

Artists always have helped us appreciate such floating worlds.

But scientists now can explain the inner workings of waves and even clouds. That is, clouds ultimately distribute their payload — from dissolving into gentle rains or catching cold winds to drive a stinging blizzard — after ferrying tons of water droplets or ice crystals across the sky.

We moderns understand the rules at work that determine the death of a cloud to sustain the life of the planet.

But water fills only one billionth of a cloud’s mass.

The rest is what artists and daydreamers have thought all along — something like spun sugar on the tongue. Here and gone. Just air in an updraft that gathers water particles aloft on an ethereal journey until the water content within reaches critical mass and falls as rain, snow, sleet or hail.

As for the resulting menagerie on parade that forms ahead of this dispersal?

That’s God’s business — something we can’t fathom or direct.

Sometimes, these floating worlds appear like “Falloons” — like the enormous, float-based, hot air balloon characters that loom large and lumber down urban canyons in Manhattan near Central Park on 77th Street in New York City during the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Other times, an indistinct expanse of gloomy clouds brood above.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration sorts clouds into 10 basic types in three distinct levels: high, middle and low.

To note, the cumulonimbus clouds associated with overcast skies cause thunderstorms and stand out as the only cloud type that can form in all three atmospheric levels.

The sometimes destructive activity of these clouds often accompanied by lightning and booming thunderclaps sent my son and I sprinting to save marigolds and morning glories from a certain shredding.

So, we collectively relate to these clouds as harbingers of bad weather — a threat we officially track and report as a step in emergency preparedness at one level or another.

But the low hanging, fair weather cumulus clouds I stopped to photograph — the ones scientists describe with zero inspiration as “cauliflower-shaped” — catch my eye for reasons just as important.

These floating worlds lift our eyes to the skies to see something more than weather — to see something that comes to life only through imagination and our unique reference points.

Too often practical considerations dominate daily life at the cost of more fanciful ones — a tension that pits the literal over the figurative.

We need both, of course, because at some point weather watching owns a relevance beyond picking what to wear outside each day.

G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) — a prolific standout literary figure and Christian apologist in early 20th century London — at times looked up from his typewriter to tap that relevance.

He studied clouds to recapture unexpected ideas with more imagination and sense of the sublime.

“There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds,” he wrote.

Pam Mellskog can be reached at p.mellskog@gmail.com or 303-746-0942. For more stories and photos, please visit timescall.com/tag/mommy-musings/.