Mornin' Rain

At 6:30am I stand in total darkness in my front yard. Tiny drop of water slam into leaves that haven't fallen yet, and then those drops crash into the leaves on the ground. Daylight should be showing already but the cloud cover hides the sun from me. No moonlight, starlight, or any other natural light is available, so please try again later. Tick…tick…tick, I can hear tiny raindrops hitting my hat. It isn't a heavy rain yet, but this is just the vanguard of a coming storm. These are the scouts before the final push to soak South Georgia, and unless I want to meet the storm full on, I had better get going.

Back when I was thirty I sat in a torrential downpour and drank beer in the open area between the apartments where I was living. That's an odd sentence. You might think I lived in that open area, but I had the upper apartment on the right facing the building. My neighbor's eight year old sister watched from their kitchen window as I sat drinking beer, and it raining like hell. Tink, tink, tink, said the rain as it ricocheted off the beer can. I remember the rain coming off the roof of the apartment seemed piss warm, and until the rain cooled the roof off, it felt like it was raining blood.

It's down in the forties this morning so the rain feels like tiny drop of acid, or little sparks. The windshield doesn't fill up entirely before the wipers kick in and erase the drops. The twin sight of my headlights peers through the darkness and I can see drops of water migrating to gravity. Dozens of tiny drops hit, are wiped away, hit again, are wiped away, hit again, and I wonder how many drop of rain are hitting South Georgia right now. I could extrapolate, you know. There are X amount of square feet in my windshield, Y number of raindrops hit them every ten second before the wipers kick in, there are Z number of square miles in South Georgia so take the number of raindrops on the windshield, divide by ten, then take that number of drops per X square feet, divide that into the total area of South Georgia and at any given second, assuming a lot of uniformity and more time on my hands than I can count I can tell you how many raindrops are hitting the earth every second.

My mind works that way, you know. I look at clouds and I wonder how many gallons of water there are, and what sort of area that cloud would cover if I could coax it down from the sky. I was in downtown Colquitt Georgia one day and the fog descended upon the town in just a matter of moments. At nine O'clock it was clear and at nine fifteen it was as thick as soup. I loved walking around in the fog, and since I was near a cemetery, I took a walk there. People wondered what I was doing, and truth be told, cemeteries are great places to find decent names for fictional characters.

What I would really like to do is have some Super Secret Molecule Bonding Glow In The Dark Trackable Dye. This is the stuff that could be spilled into a rain puddle and as the puddle overflowed the dye would bond to a certain mass of water molecules and I would be able to track those molecules, which would be, by the way, large enough to see from a distance, and I could follow them from the rain puddle downhill to a stream then to a creek then to a river and finally all the way to the sea. How long would it be before my florescent colored water fell on me, while I was standing in my front yard, and I could look at my windshield ( while trying to calculate the number of drops) and say, "Oh, there you are again."

Take Care,

Mike