What's On The Other Side Of The Raindrop

What’s on the other side of the Raindrop

When I was about 10 or 11 years old and in 5th grade we were learning about molecules at school. What they looked like and how they worked. The teacher showed us models of the nucleus surrounded by the orbiting atoms and told us that everything on Earth was made up of these teeny tiny bits that we couldn’t even see. The idea really caught my attention. It’s probably the first experience I’ve had of actually contemplating something. I have a very clear memory of standing in the produce section of the grocery store with my mother one day and thinking about whether the oranges were actually tiny galaxies and if “people” lived there, to them we were great awesome god-like creatures. I thought of the tiny bits of pulp. Were they oceans or other even tinier universes? What would it be like to be that small? Then I began to think about our universe. Maybe we were a miniscule part of some other being’s orange. I remember feeling at the time that it probably went both ways, from vastly tiny to unimaginably huge. The idea of never-ending was there but the imagining of it was hard, though I still kept turning it over and over in my mind. That night as I lay in bed I started to rub small circles on one spot of my bedroom wall thinking about all the little molecules I must be rubbing off and wondering how long it would take me to get through the wall. Then I realized that if all things on Earth were made of those little bits then I was also wearing away my finger. I quickly stopped rubbing.

That sense of skewed perspective is still with me and still causes me to look at things and imagine what it’s like to be part of them, part of a different world, different reality. When I looked at the droplet in the center of this cluster of Lady’s Mantle leaves and all the smaller ones gathered along the tiny hairs of the other leaves my imagination could see a window to another world.

What’s

in

there?

Tavia, the tiny green fairy, stretched and yawned and slowly opened her eyes then immediately fell backwards off her twig. Heart pounding, wings folded back and trembling, she slowly peered over the edge of her sleeping web and saw one gigantic, blue eye looking back at her. She froze, not sure what to do. After several long, breathless moments she began to think the eye was some trick of the light through the dewdrops resting on the canopy overhead and started to relax just a bit. Then it blinked. And unable to handle any more scary surprises, the fairy zoomed off in the opposite direction to tell somebody, anybody about the giant terrible eye!

All a flutter, she landed on the broad, soft petal that Queenie the luna moth called her own and started babbling about the eye and what she saw and how it blinked and how scary it was. Unfortunately for the little fae, Queenie had been in the middle of a particularly nice dream when she was jostled awake by the wobbling of her petal and the franticly babbling fae. Feeling annoyed, Queenie slowly opened one eye and stared at the fae. Instantly the tiny fairy gasped and squeaked, pointed at Queenie’s one open eye and fainted dead away. Queenie’s annoyance quickly changed to concern as she picked up little Tavia and fanned her with a large, pale green wing. What on earth could have frightened the little thing so much, Queenie wondered.

The moth lifted the tiny fairy gently onto her petal and wafted off towards the sleeping web where Tavia spent her nights. Looking around and then up towards the point where the lady’s mantle leaves met at the center of a tightly furled bud she noticed a glinting droplet. It was reflecting back a strange oblong, rectangular object with a glassy surface with a small, square dark spot near one end that looked like a window to a room with no lights on at the center of which was what looked like a round glass bead. Then there was a bright flash, nearly blinding Queenie and while she was thinking about how lovely it would be to dance around a flash that bright during her nightly round of porch lights, the strange oblong thing with the window drew back and pulled away.

I took this photo with my Samsung S9 smartphone and enlarged it with Google Photo. The colors are not enhanced or manipulated.