Willow The Water Droplet

My name is Willow the water droplet. I started my life in the ocean and have been sitting here for thousands of years. I was sitting there and then all of a sudden, I was flying. I went up, up, up with other droplets of water. We all condensed and made a cloud. A fluffy cloud that you are seeing in your sky right now. We sit there for a while and move across the sky. More and more water droplets come into our cloud everyday. One water droplet that I became friends with told me that I evaporated from the ocean and she’s been sitting in this cloud for 100 days . The more and more water droplets came, the heavier the cloud became and soon, after 20 days, I fell back into the ocean.

I sank to the bottom of the ocean, I sat there with some strange animals that seemed to thrive in the water. I was making some more friends in the bottom of the ocean and he said that me floating down back into the ocean was called precipitation which is what you call rain. I slowly moved to the surface and just when I was getting comfortable, I was flying again. I flew back up into the clouds and kept making more friends. I’ve learned a lot from my water friends. I got a great view of the earth from the clouds and was missing it. It got really cold up in my cloud and I started freezing.

It was so cold in the cloud and soon there were many cold water droplets. One elder drop said that we were turning into snowflakes. There finally were too many snowflakes in the cloud and we drifted down onto a mountain. Falling as a snowflake was so different from falling as a raindrop. A snowflake is so much lighter than a raindrop and I didn’t come down as fast. On the mountain, there weren’t many humans or animals because it was so cold. The Sun came out and used its light energy to melt me back into a water droplet and I rolled down the mountain into a puddle. An animal that looked like a big cat came and drank me because he was thirsty. I sat there for a little while and then I was suddenly out and back on the ground. I kept rolling down the mountain and many water droplets were doing that too. We soon stopped in a river and we were flowing down somewhere. I had no idea where we were going.

While I was flowing down the river, I heard a lot of stories about where other water droplets have been. Some were in the clouds for years and years and were very hot. One was underwater flowing through the dirt into this river and many many more places. I was flying yet again and now I knew where I was going, the clouds. Although I knew where I was going now, I didn’t know where I was going after the clouds. This time I was in the clouds. I learned how I fell down to the earth. It was something called gravity. Gravity is what keeps everything on earth on the earth. Without gravity, we would all float away into space. Gravity doing its job, I dropped back down onto the earth. I was back in the ocean, I wonder how many times I’ll be back here. I once again evaporate into the clouds and then gravity, once again does it’s thing and I drop back down but I land on the ground and go down into the dirt.

It’s very different from the rivers, oceans, and glaciers that I’ve been to. I go through the ground and runoff into a lake, the lake is kind of like the ocean but a lot smaller. I really like being in the lake because it’s smaller and I’m not moving around, except when I fly up into the clouds again. I go through this cycle over and over so whether I’m in a cloud in your sky, or the rain falling, or your water in your water bottle, I will always be here!