Water Droplets

Now I am back inside, after changing out of the wet garments from the walk in the rain to observe and contemplate how it would be best to communicate what it is like observing out in the natural world. It is amazing what can be noticed, noting what then must be left unobserved, obscured by holding focus on the chosen subjects that pass by the minds eye while deliberately walking down a trail. Walking along I considered just how little I would be willing to describe, when considering the total that was before my eye out there. With so many subjects available, what is interesting, and what can be concisely worded to hold the attention of both myself and any potential audience. Here goes.

I prepared for stepping out the door into the steady almost heavily falling rain, by first retrieving a fresh change of clothing to await my return. I grabbed that old Gore-Tex coat that I now call soak-tex, it is old, put on a rim hat and out the door. First off I noticed just how heavy the rain was falling. Within moments I felt the chill of water on my skin, yet I knew it would be so. I went down the porch steps, crossed the lawn, turned right and stepped onto the muddy trail. I noted, vocalizing the words be careful, it might be slick. Immediately my pants contacted the sagging foliage heavy with water clinging to apparently every available space that could support droplets, absorbing every drop that contacted them. Again I noted the cool temperature, shockingly for a grief second. Soon the pant legs were saturated, I almost felt like a kid again out walking in the rain, just because I can.

As I walked along the narrow trail, with its water laden plants now leaning in toward the trail’s center, I noticed the droplets of water. They were both in motion and rock still. I saw little bitty ones that broke apart flying from the brim on my hat more than once, with a whack, they burst off, arching downward, passing out of sight. The drops clung to the plants keeping an equilibrium between its hydrogen bonding and gravity. The droplets suspended in what ever form shine like diamonds almost. Unlike diamonds though, their edges dome up, forming beads that can hang or stand alone. As I walked past the low branch of a pine, its needles hung down with differing sized drops at each needles tip. They hung there near motionless gleaming out with refracted backward images, reflections in a miniaturized scale, having bright crescent margins, sagging to gravity. A leaf blade of grass bent fully over with its upper surface segmented into a vee, had a solitary droplet standing on the uppermost apex of its arch. I thought it astounding, just how a drop of water perched itself forming a squat rounded dome like shape having a slightly flattened upper surface, with those crescent shaped reflections, dazzling at its edges. I also noted that some leaves seem to be hydrophobic, repelling the rain, causing the water to bead up, which is likely the same cause that formed the droplet on the blade of grass. Yet on the leaves of the snowberry bushes, this repulsion of water was more pronounced than the way water clung to the leaves of other plant species. I intuit that as the raindrops strike the leaves, the impact can disrupt its form, the collision busting the falling droplet into very small droplets. With all possible conditions available, some of these smaller fragments can again light upon the leaf and come to rest, apparently suspended on the leafs surface, in locations where the slope of the leaf was small enough to allow its rest. Water out in the natural world interacts in unique ways. It causes many of the shapes we as humans adore. All one must do is recollect the sight of a waterfall or a solitary droplet standing on the surface of a leaf while walking in the rain. Water is that precious resource seemingly here in great abundance, following gravities pull ever down via that path of least resistance.