We had several consecutive days of storms before Thanksgiving. The steps to our porch are cedar, and were once sweet-potato orange. Several years’ worth of weathering has darkened them to the warm brown hue of ipe wood. As an architect, I learn about materials by noticing how they age. As the porch steps have darkened, they’ve become mirror-like when wet. During last week’s squall, I watched rain drops pick up speed, forming bubbles that popped as quickly as they formed. Behind the busy patter of splashes, I noticed the reflection of our neighbor’s treetops sway across the bottom tread as the wind picked up and then subsided. A pine needle on a higher stair quivered slightly. On the ground, a single yellow leaf remained steadfast throughout.
A special hello to Amy in the Pacific Northwest–a Coconut Girl who gets a lot of rain.
Raindrops, such as these in the blog – are so endlessly wondrous. How heightened our awareness becomes of the subtle water world there on flat, horizontal surfaces when we watch the little leaf or pine needle “visitors” that happen onto the watery-rain-stage. Sometimes these visitors cling to their wet “landing strip” by water’s surface tension; sometimes they are set afloat by barely perceivable rivulets and breaths of wind. How the wet surfaces on sidewalks, streets, steps, porches pick up wiggly reflections – constantly interrupted by those raindrops I always, as a child, imagined to be tiny tiny dancers !
Knowing raindrops as “dancers” I have never wanted to override with a more informed knowledge of exactly what is happening as a physicist would explain those watery happenings to be. No matter what time of year, when I awake, during the dark night and see raindrops blown onto the bedroom window pane, I am drawn over to look at those beloved raindrops, dancing on their puddle-ballroom floor.
I’m always amazed at how flat, normally non-reflective surfaces turn into mirrors when it rains.