Virga

The cloud in the distance is dumping its contents and I can watch the cloud approaching.

Duckduckgo images [virga.]

Suddenly I'm in it and the whole thing is gray.

It's the darnedest thing. 

I've never lived anywhere that it's this clear. Often even more clear than this. There'll be a whole bank of clouds and off in the distance one of them is dumping itself straight down. 

It's pure art.

It never fails to captivate my imagination. 

Sometimes you can be under one and not even get wet. 

The air is so dry the clouds cannot hold their water. Sometimes you can be under a virga and not get wet because the droplets dry before hitting the ground. 

And you can see that in the distance too. 

If you are an artist you could paint this by drying a larger flat brush and set it on the bottom edge of a wet painted cloud then pull downward to partially cover the thing already painted. The result would look exactly like this. 

And then people viewing your painting would go, "That doesn't even look real." But it does. It happens here all the time. 

Other places I lived the entire sky turns the same gray from end to end and it rains everywhere the same all at once. 

But here we see it raining over there in the distance.

The sky was completely electric. 

I could have set up my tripod and attached the lightening capture device but I'd have to replace its battery. And I have to re-read the instructions each time because the device does other things. I could have got dozens of strikes. They were happening right in my frame; my little window created by the "U" shape of the building I'm in. I'm in the bottom of the "U." In the middle of a stack of "U's." The middle of the middle, and the lightning was going BLAM, BLAM, BLAM all over the place. It was fun. I missed a good opportunity.