Hi! I’m Drip, a water drop. This is the story of my first time going through the water cycle.

On a completely normal day, I was playing tennis with my best friend, Plop, when I started floating! I didn’t understand why until she explained the process of evaporation to me. She said that once water gets hot - like how I was getting worked up while playing, - it’ll evaporate and turn into water vapor.

Pretty soon Plop had evaporated, too. We were both in the clouds with some other people who were going through the process at the same time as us. Plop then took the time we had in the sky to explain where we were going next. She said we were going to condensate into a form of precipitation like rain, snow, or hail, and we would most likely fall back into water.

After the condensation, I fell straight into a small puddle. A couple of people joined me and pretty soon we were able to roll out of the hole and down a hill. Rolling down the hill wasn’t very simple. It was bumpy and uncomfortable. It made me too dizzy to stand up right away, but that soon subsided. I realized that Plop wasn’t with me, and I assumed the wind had taken her to a larger body of water. 

An older drop, probably as old as my father, approached me and asked if this was my first cycle. I questioned what that word meant and he explained the whole cycle to me. He stated that the process we just went through was the movement through rocks and soil - infiltration. He said that we are not groundwater, even though we are water on the ground. Groundwater is water beneath the surface, formed through a different process called percolation.