There was once upon a time, in the rocky mountains of a fairy tale country, a cement factory. As the name indicates, humans produced cement there, and this was well before the times of air filters, so all the dust generated during the cement production process went up the huge furnaces and out in the atmosphere, sticking to and settling on every object and surface in their path.
All the plants, all the animals, everything around the cement factory was covered in a grey film of dust giving the scenery an eerie aspect of being a huge cement sculpture.
The people had gotten used to the strange appearance of the scenery around the factory, and, as their livelihoods depended on it, they did not pay attention to it. It was a small price to pay for being able to take care of their families, feed their children, support them to get an education.
The humans avoided thinking too much about the impact of the grey dust covering everything, and they never dared look up at the huge, grey clouds towering above the factory, completely obscuring the sun. The only light that managed to come through was milky and powdery, giving the entire scenery a doomed aspect.
The thick dust pushed in the atmosphere through the large furnaces had a strange effect on the clouds, it made them stuck, they could no longer float freely across they sky as they are meant to, but they became stationary above the factory absorbing more and more cement dust with every passing day.
The momma and papa clouds tried to protect their baby clouds as much as they could by sheltering them, covering them as much as possible with their own cloudy, billowing beings. However, despite their efforts, the baby clouds were also exposed to the ever-present and all-pervading cement dust, and they too became covered and clogged with the grey powder.
Years passed and the cloud family got heavier with dust while the scenery looked like it had been burnt and now ash was all that was left. The humans could not ignore the issue any longer. They could no longer pretend there were birds in the sky, animals roaming the ashen fields, or flowers blooming as they once had in the lush countryside.
So, scientists set to work and in a short while they created air filters for the furnaces. Air filters that trapped all the grey dust and prevented it from escaping and settling on the world outside.
When the air filters were installed it was like a miracle had taken place. The air became fresher, the clouds started to clean themselves and the world beneath them with life giving rain.
The cloud family was also beyond happy, and the parents felt that they can unwrap themselves from around their children and allow them to grow and develop. What they did not expect was that the baby clouds would be carried away by the wind so quickly, before they got the chance to say good bye properly.
It was ok though, the hard part was over, they had managed to survive the horrible dust of the cement factory, now they could become their own fluffy beings.
When the wind carried away Timmy, the eldest, he was taken over by an ecstatic feeling of freedom. He could move, he could travel, he could roam the skies and discover all the world had to offer. He would miss his family of course, but he had been waiting for it for so long, that all he could think about were all the wonderous things to come.
And they did, Timmy travelled the skies far and wide, he met all sorts of other clouds, he saw all sorts of other things, but somehow, something inside him prevented him from really belonging to anywhere. Because he had been stuck for so long, he seemed incapable of building a world of his own.
As time went by, Timothy, as he was known now, longed to have his own place in the too wide and too large sky, and, as luck would have it, sometime later he found it next to Persida, a personable Cumulus Congestus cloud.
Timothy and Persida created their own cluster of clouds and would float peacefully across the sky. All was great until, from time to time, Timothy would spew out grey dust, covering everything in their peaceful world with pain and fear.
They were far, far away from the cement factory and its suffocating dust, but somehow, Timothy had internalized it so much that when the skies were blue and the ride smooth, he felt the need to shake it up, to darken and bring it down a notch.
Sometimes, in spring, when the smell of the flowers was so strong that it reached even the highest cloud, Timothy would tell stories of his difficult childhood and all the sacrifices his parents had to make. His cloudy children would shake off their fluffy sides in exasperation. ‘Not again with those stories!’
Persida understood and listened. Timothy was the cloud he was in his wholeness, the bright, airy parts, and the dusty, dark sides, it was just a pity that he did not fully realize that the darkness of the cement factory was well in the past …
When evening came, after Timothy had fallen asleep, Persida drifted silently through their little cluster. She washed the grey dust from the children’s soft white bodies with a gentle rain.
When she looked back, Timothy was sleeping peacefully, but even in his sleep, sometimes, faint, tiny wisps of grey escaped from him and dissolved into the night sky.