In a fairly long email composed of short, descriptive sentences that were each on their own line, which made the message look like a poem, we were asked about the long, skinny, brown worms that come out after it rains. The reader noted several things about the worms, most notably that they are, once more, long, skinny, and brown, and also that the worms dry out on the sidewalk after the rain evaporates. So, we have a basic “what are the worms that come out after its rain” sort of question, which we have addressed in different contexts a couple of times before. The answer to the reader’s precise question is extremely simple – the long, skinny, brown worms are almost certainly just earthworms – but her email suggests other dimensions of interest, so we’ll discuss why earthworms come out after it rains, and why they often end up dead on the sidewalk when the precipitation and its aftermath have passed.