Monday, November 13, 2006

The Rain in Spain Falls Mainly on the Plain

Rain is rain. End of story, right? And Hail is something different, snow and sleet are other categories again. Or so you might think. Apparently the Eskimo have dozens of words for “snow”. And I heard a story once of some guy who did an experiment and isolated himself in a cave for some ridiculously long amount of time and ended up being able to recognize various different types of water drops solely from the sound of them falling.

Today it rained in the city. It’s always a spectacle to watch a storm roll in from the upper floors of a tall building with lots of windows, but today’s rain was something else altogether.

The wind was coming in and gusting in a dozen different directions, and the cold change was right on the verge of freezing the raindrops. Flakes of almost-snow almost-rain almost-hail were swirling and dancing, up and down and across and over and under and around.

It was beautiful. Enough even to have the jaded office workers lined up pushing their noses up against the glass in awe.

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