Jack - You did it for me with only two words... "mare's tail"!
My mother taught me that old description of cirrus clouds - the kind that spell rain or snow within the next twelve to twenty-four hours - when I was just a boy (more than a half-century ago).
Today, in kayaks, on the lake in Maine with my 9-year-old granddaughter, Isabella (Izzy), out beyond "Blueberry Island" almost to the middle of the lake, she with a pretty blue ball cap with her curly blonde pony-tail stuck out through the hole in the back of her cap, I looked to the West and high above the dark green pines on the far shore were the crisp white wisps of "mare's tails" foretelling of tomorrow's weather.
I said, "Look Isabella, mare's tails!" She said, "Huh?" So I told her what my mother had taught me so long ago finishing by saying, "...so, those are mare's tails, what do you think about that?"
She said, "Well Grampy, they don't look like mare's tails to me and I took horseback riding lessons you know."......
