Of Pens and Swords

It starts to drop, slowly, carried by the winds coming from the north, up-drafts from convections. It flits around on the winds, through the sky, for seemingly an eternity. While its fluttering around, seeing the small world down below, it grows larger through accretion, though it doesn’t know the process. It only has one life to live, one that makes a fruit fly’s life an eternity. It still drops, maybe a little more rapidly than before, but this is life, the older and bigger you get, the faster things move. It’s an exciting time for this young flake. It starts to be able to make out more detail of the ground below, trying to figure out what it all means. The winds pick up the flake again, send it flying higher again. This is when the flake realizes that if it wants to see what is below, it has to be bigger, so to fight the winds. It starts growing more, so it can see what is down below, fighting the winds.

Finally, little flake gets big enough to start dropping again. It sees the opportunity to skirt around the winds grasp as well, and starts it’s freefall to the ground…What an exciting rush this is; it gets to where it was before, and now is past it in an instant, dropping closer to the world below….what will little flake find when it gets there? Dropping faster and faster, it sees that parts of the ground are moving, looking like streams of something. The flake thinks, I wonder if I can catch a ride on that stream, and see more of the world? It would make sense, since flake can’t propel itself back into the air…it still has to rely on the winds for that unfortunately.

Flake picks out one of these moving pieces of ground, starts flipping end over end to help stabilize its fall; turns sideways into the winds so to tack the winds instead of being blown by them…it’s got this part down pat. Flake eyes his target as it gets closer, picks it’s aiming spot….What a rush, the world is finally here, so close…what is it all about?! Farther and farther it falls. Flake starts concentrating on maneuvering to keep the target in it’s crosshairs; tacking, flipping, tacking again. Suddenly, the winds die, flake is in a freefall. Flake looks down, sees the target, though the stream is not a stream at all, but a thousand large objects following a path, and moving a lot faster than it seemed before. Flake tries to change direction, it’s only got mere feet, but there is no wind to carry it…it pans flat, hoping to slow it’s decent, glide to another location…this is scary…but flake does it, starts changing direction.

All of a sudden, another wind, this time from below, grabs flake. It pulls it along with the path of moving objects, faster and faster, and dragging it down quickly. Flake realizes that this is it, maybe it has time to scrawl out a warning to others, so they don’t get trapped by the same fate. The winds are dragging flake faster down, it sees one of the large objects bearing right down on it……

Splat. The lady driving the car sees the small sized droplet form on her windshield, thinks that the forecasted storm must be on its way. Suddenly, another flake hits the windshield, and holds its integrity long enough for her to realize that this isn’t rain, but snow….

Living in Kansas, this lady is deathly afraid of snow….so she, moving at 65mph, slams on the breaks during rush hour traffic, causing two cars to rear-end each other, pushing her car into the wall- sideways, backwards, flips into oncoming traffic, hit by another car…….metal screeching beyond it’s tolerances, fire erupts, airbags deploy….

All because of that little snowflake…