You can't take the sky from me

People who dismiss the plains states as "flyover country" don't realize that out here, the sky is the scenery. These are views west from the house I grew up in, over our neighbor's wheat field, out in the country in north-central Oklahoma. I took them yesterday, on the evening of my birthday. The one above is just a few minutes before it started raining here--you can see a curtain of rain falling on the horizon. If you cover up the wheat and the bright sky under the clouds, it could be one of those artists' impressions of the atmosphere of Jupiter.


I took this about half an hour later, after the rain had passed. Some groovy mammatus clouds there on the bottom of the thunderhead.

Pretty good birthday present. Thanks, universe.