Wearing Raindrops Like Jewels

You took your coat off
And stood in the rain
You were always crazy like that . . .

It's been wet and drizzly lately, and the rains have turned my world suddenly, exuberantly, green. It seems like just yesterday it was minus five and I was wearing layer after layer, out in the cold morning air capturing the frost mist rising and all of winter's best magic. Can it be summer already? Is time speeding up, I wonder?

It was the morning of my second of two appointments for a dental repair. I lost a crown a month or more ago. About two weeks ago, they put in a temporary crown to replace it. On this morning, they would install the real crown, and I would get to spend some additional quality time in the dentist's chair before heading off to work with a numb mouth and face.

But I took a few minutes to enjoy a break in the rain with one of my lightning-fast visits to the Arboretum. It was drizzling when I got there, trying to clear. I found some pasque-flowers and knelt down to snap a few macro shots of the seed heads just as the sun shone through for the very first time. And as I looked closer, I noticed something very special, something magical: every single flower had gathered raindrops and was wearing them like sparkling jewels.

I was fascinated by them, and took many pictures. (Yes, I do spend lots of time kneeling and crawling around on the ground, even in dress clothes, even in the rain; I was always crazy like that.) And I thought to myself as I enjoyed the water droplets bedecking the fuzzy tendrils of the seed heads:

Has it always been like this, and I never noticed?

Has there always been all this magic?

The song to accompany this strange image (that in some weird way calls to mind tiny lion manes and tiny lion tamers) is a little tune by Jewel. In fact, it is one of the first of her songs that I ever heard and loved immediately. There's a jewel in my Blip title, and the song begins with a story about someone standing in the rain. Enjoy the song, whose initial lyrics I quoted at the beginning of the Blip: Jewel, with Foolish Games.