Krazy Krystal's Laboratory

First impressions

I love the rain. I've got quite vivid early childhood memories of sitting at home in the lounge room by the large glass doors watching the sky open up and pelt down rain onto the patio during a summer thunderstorm. There's something relaxing about watching rain fall - renewal, provision - and I often catch myself staring out the window, hypnotised. This happened last week, when I was in the lab and it was raining from a deep grey green bruised sky. After a while i noticed something odd; it was as if the rain started to defy gravity, slowing the rate at which it fell, like someone had paused the sky and put it on slow forward. I realised at this point in time that it was no longer rain, but snow. A gradual phase shift, imperceptible at first but solidifying into soft magical powder that floats to the ground. It's completely mesmerising. Like trying to determine the exact moment of sunset, it is an elusive yet lingering moment of time. Even more strange is watching the flakes caught in a draft, spinning upward, like frozen angels dancing over the rooftops. This snow didn't stick, the life span of the beauty was short, as the flakes melted away to nothingness as they hit the ground.

Of course, wonder is relative. I now have first hand experience of words such as "flurry", "flake" and "sleet". No longer text on a page, I have an imprint of what they are. It's a kind of privilege to be able to have first impressions of things as an adult, and not a child. To ask a British person what they thought about the first time they saw snow is possibly akin to asking an Australian what they first thought about the beach. In both cases, there are people who were adults the first time they saw these things, but on a whole, these experiences are embedded in childhood and thus not particularly well annotated in memory. And so now I wonder what else is there that we all take for granted, accept as normal, which is actually slightly surreal. Perhaps rain even. Water falling from the sky - how terrifyingly strange and exotic it would seem if you'd never experienced getting soaked by a storm, or lightly drizzled on by misty rain.

I guess this cartoon really sums it up for me, that we do take so much in our stride, and really, sometimes it's nice to be the crazy Australian laughing on her way to work, cause it's snowing and it's beautiful.

posted by Dr Krystal @ 12:58 pm