G is for Goose-bumpy

After yesterday’s post about Fury, I had started writing about another emotion with a story I desperately wanted to share about my friendly neighborhood grouch. Then this afternoon I came across this almost made up sounding word. So grouch has been saved for another day.

This hyphenated (or not) word emphasizes a very particular physical effect. When I started thinking, I realized that it’s not merely one, but a group of feelings. It could be anything from the chills one gets while reading The Omen, or the sensation while watching a very hairy eight legged arachnid lay one deliberate step before another, crawling up someone’s very sensitive leg.

The word took me back to this one year around the end of the monsoon season in India. It happened on a long stretch of a tarred road. Clouds were marching down towards me. I could smell the rain somewhere, but not a drop fell where I stood. 

Then I saw it. 

On the meadows just beyond where the road turned, a sheet of water stretched from the clouds as high as I could see. A surreal water curtain from the sky down to the earth, several feet away and I stood completely dry, watching it.

I stared as it rinsed the tarred road which gleamed black where the water touched it. I stood on the very dusty, very sooty part of the road, rooted to the core of the earth unable to move. 

I was watching the edge of rain.

I watched, motionless, bound by awe and goose-bumps, as though from the dry side of a waterfall as it swelled and rushed my way, drenching everything in its path including me in a matter of seconds.

Yes. Goosebumpy is quite a legitimate feeling.