I had to write this for Science Class yesterday and I had to name my drop which isn't realistic, then I made it think, see and feel, unrealistic. Everything else is real though.

Fire’s Journey

By Elizabeth Mathers

Once upon a time underneath the ground, underneath the place where moles can dig, in an area that was compressed to the size of a piece of gravel lived a raindrop. His name was Fire and he was a piece of groundwater. Groundwater is water that soaks into the ground and collects between rock and soil.

It so happens that a bunch of farmland which needed irrigation, the process of collecting water through the ground to water crops, and one day Fire was sucked up by a pipe and brought to the surface. It was cloudy that day and Fire had never seen the sun or knew that it was. So he waded there. Suddenly, the clouds parted and the sun appeared. Fire got hotter and hotter and as he looked around he way all of the other water disappearing into the air. Abruptly he could feel himself being pulled into the air high above the trees. This is evaporation, the process of when water turns onto a gas.

Many days passed and Fire could always see a whole bunch of new water vapor appear and cluster near him. Soon he was able to see his form again and things were a lot heavier. This is condensation, the process of water vapor changing into a gas then to a liquid. The clouds were gray and seemed to threaten everything below it. Fire could hear thunder and see lightning and feel the other drops beginning to slide away from him. It was raining. It is also called precipitation, when water or ice that condenses in air falls down as rain, hail or snow.

He was falling so hard that he tried to keep his form together. SPLAT! He smashed against an area of soil. He could feel himself sink into the ground again only this time it was because a plant nearby was soaking him up. Fire spent a couple days inside that plant until one night he reached the stage when the plant let him out. This is called transpiration, water that gets into the atmosphere from plant leaves or trees.

He plopped onto the ground along with a little steam of water. It had rained again. He was being carried away. He just kept moving along, going with the flow, until a sudden crash indicated that he had reached a larger body of water. He was an example of a little stream that didn’t soak into the ground or evaporate and ran into a larger body of water such as a lake, river, or an ocean. This is called runoff.

Happily he lived in his new home. Frolicking among the other water droplets, Fire knew that this was better than being concealed inside a little area under the ground. One day the sun shone brightly and Fire could feel himself being pulled up again. It was happening again!

Oh boy, not again, Fire thought.