When I was younger, I would wait for days like these with a kind of breathless excitement. My cousins and I would run out with buckets to collect the first hailstones, laughing as they bounced off the floor and stung our fingers with their tiny, icy weight. To my five-year-old self, they felt like strange little creatures dropped from another world, cold and impossible to hold for long before they slipped back into the water. I remember standing there with wet hair stuck to my forehead and my hands turning numb, wondering where the hails had come from and how the sky could hide such things inside it. At times like these, even the earth smells different as the dust begins to loosen itself. Perhaps that is why the coming of the rains has gathered so many stories around itself.