Probably my favorite thing about El Salvador is the clouds. They conjure themselves out of thin air in the afternoons. Sometimes they're long, soft strips hanging in the sky, benign, making colors out of sunlight, content to drift by and then disappear. Other days they rise black and ugly over the mountains surrounding our valley, billowing into the blue sky overhead, angrily swirling and building until they flash with lightning, shiver with thunder, and explode with rain.
Sometimes when I'm supposed to be driving I admire the clouds instead, which probably means I shouldn't have a driver's license, or children for that matter. But the clouds. They're like cosmic art spread wide above everything, a divine expo in the sky that nobody's watching. They're so obvious that they're a secret, a secret that lets itself out everyday to anybody looking up.