Bigger Picture Moments: Rainbow Hunting

I thought it was only the nighttime bugs still grinding their noises into the sunrise.  Crickets and cicadas and katydids making a chorus of zeezerts in the forest.  They'd maybe forgotten the hour and had been so caught up in the joy of making music that they continued to carry on as the sky grew light. 

But the window light was too bright.  And too watery.  The music wasn't of insects, but of rainfall, pounding on the house in a sleepy drone.  Either way, I thought, the hmmmming was welcome.  The better to sing me back to sleep before the kids would wake for the day.  I rolled over and breathed deeply, throwing out a leg from under the quilt.  I love summertime typed itself behind my eyelids.  And then I was asleep again.

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Breakfast is finished.  The dishes are scattered in unlikely places around the middle of the house.  An empty plate smeared with peanut butter and sprinkled with crushed toast crumbs is on the couch.  A cup of water sits beside a licked-clean bowl of yogurt on the tv cabinet. 

Rain still pelts the windows and I don't mind; the grass is already turning brown.  I whisper to the earth -- soak and savor -- but I know how hard it is to hold onto the freshness.  How quickly a hot wind can make one forget the cool drink that came only hours before.   

There have already been three arguments and it's not even 9 o'clock in the morning.  I might have already soaked and savored the best part of this day while I slept with one leg kicked free.  But that thought is sticky and gritty.  I wipe it away, flicking the leftover bits of negativity into the rain. 

At the patio door, a slanted sword of sunlight pierces the floor.  A sunny rain.  A rainy sun. 

"Girls!"  I am breathless.  "There's sunshine with the rain!  Hurry -- let's go see if we can find a rainbow!"  I am wearing swishy black pajama pants and a too-tight tank-top.  The girls are in their bathing suits, ready for everything summer might require.  They run to the hallway and shove their feet into rainboots.  I find my silver flip flops.  We are out the door in the wet air, startling a chickadee on the porch railing. 

We tromp into glittering grass, searching the skies.  Blue in the west, cloudy in the east where the sun climbs.  We are on the wrong side of it, I think.  But the girls race around the house, flinging the last of the raindrops off of their arms and legs as they fly. 

I watch them, tall and expectant and so ready to hunt a rainbow.  As if it weren't the most simple thing in the world -- refracted light through raining prisms.  As if a rainbow is their only desire on this summer morning, and would fulfill their every ideal.

It's only beautiful, I think.  Only colors.

But it's the fleeting surprise of the colors that make them worth hunting.  I watch my daughters hold hands and choose vantage points and laugh at preposterisms, and though there is no rainbow for us today, I see colors.  I see beautiful.

I see the fleeting surprise and I whisper to myself as they dash around the corner of the house--

Soak and savor it, Sarah.  Don't let the next hot wind erase the freshness of this moment.

And as I say it, the rain stops completely.  The clouds are wiped beyond the ring of trees, and there is nothing but a wide, jewel-blue sky to hear my promise. 



We're seeing the Bigger Picture through simple moments -- moments that force us to stop and take notice of the ways our worlds are important, meaningful, and beautiful. Please join us at Alita's place today! Grab the button, link up, and read a few others to encourage them as they find the fullness in the simple.