Neighbors had been whispering that the park was renting weather. It sounded like a rumor until we asked at the kiosk by the gate, where a handwritten sign offered shade by the half hour.
"We do not keep storms," the park keeper said, stamping a ticket with a tiny umbrella. "Just the polite clouds. Return them if they start to yawn." A woman in the morning line nodded as if this were ordinary, then pointed her stroller toward a pale puff waiting above the roses. Two dachshunds sat behind her, already cooling their paws on the ticket booth shadow.
By evening the same pair came back with their person and stood under yesterday's cooler patch of grass, as if checking that the cloud had been put away neatly.