Water. What an apt theme for today’s Photo 101 course. It’s raining quite sensibly over here, with the rumbles of thunder growling in the background and there’s something about the elements that makes me feel so alive.

My mind is lost in a maze of thoughts and feelings as I tap to the drip-drop of the rainfall and the rumbles.  It simply makes me want to chatter over a nice cup of coffee.

It reminds me of naked and carefree days as a child dancing with glee in the rain and singing ‘rain, rain, go away,’ with my siblings and the neighbours kids, to our mothers dismay when they eventually caught us.

Rainy days reminds me of early days of learning to give myself a bath as a kid and my concentration point was to scrub my tummy over and over until my mother took over the sponge and gave such a thorough scrubbing that left me squeaky clean with tingling skin.

It takes me back to years gone by, of putting plastic pails under the corrugated zinc roof,  to collect pools of water from the rain due to the epileptic service of the water taps.

The days of going up and down the slippery, clay slope that led to the village stream with swinging kegs to fetch water for my grandma’s big pitchers pass through my mind. We would wade in and splash around in the stream before finding our way home, but my dalliance with water of deep depths was rudely brought to a stop one day, when a water snake came gliding by as we frolicked.

It scared the blinking daylights out of me. Hurtling out of the stream, my wading days in untamed water was over. I DESPISE snakes!!

I do love to wallow in the pool or the jacuzzi, when I get the chance, but I keep away from the deep end.

I know my paranoia comes from an incident back in the days, of witnessing a young man disappear into the waters of Tarkwa Bay in Lagos and was never found again.

This paranoia got further cemented with the loss of my brother-in-law to the cold, watery fingers of a lake in Ontario, Canada four years ago.

Nonetheless, I made sure to teach my children to swim and we dally with water with a lot of respect. At the beach, we only pluck our butts on the sand, play and maybe allow our toes to get wet. No more, no less.

It’s needless to say that human life cannot exist without this liquid essence.

My photos come from different places, and most times I take a landscape/horizontal shots for a wider perspective.