Childhood Evening Rain, in Summer

Nothing but the wind and shining moonlight comforts the uncountable molecules of pooled-up water hanging together. Under their building weight they are no longer supported by the air, and so slip out of it, one by one, heading downward and out of the cool summer night sky.

The reaching force of gravity can touch them now, and so they fall towards the center of the earth, passing from heavenly black sky towards the darkened earthy netherworld.

Below, the canopy of a forest is ignorant of the wetness to come; its leaves bluster about in the still warm summer breezes; this late at night, the trees emit only all the shades of shadow. The dry crisp rustling leaves remain baked by some forgotten sun, but not dry for long. Right now they still whisper as they are rubbed against themselves by the movement of humid night-time air. Air so clean and fresh; but still so thick with the heavyness of a muggy day.

All at once, the drop is grown, its infancy gone too quickly to be remembered. It falls now and the experience is building, accelerating and overwhelming. Every other drop it knew is either left behind or whirling uncontrollably about it, tossed by wind and pulled by gravity. Sister drops are blown so far away that they will never meet again, not at least until they are crushed by ground and dissolved back into the oceans – their bodies and individualities all lost in dissolution and obliterated in form; recognizable by nothing.

Now and then, the lightening illuminates each and every one of them up, for but a second. And, although they no longer touch each other as they did once in the cloud, they remain frozen both in time and light, if only for one single instant. And for that moment only, it is as if they are together once again, this time in icy white and fleeting brilliance. All are touched by the same source of electric energy in a unified field of electric photons.

This downward journey is quick and fleeting; their birth and youth now gone, their mature life rushing to an end. Every raindrop, born to die. To fall from heaven to earth.

The sky touching the ground.

.