Thursday, April 9, 2009

The Rainbows

This is a little essay I wrote back in 2003 which was first published on The Everyday Goddess Collection, LLC website (The website is no longer in service.) I'm not sure why I ended up coming across this essay today ~ Perhaps because today is a beautiful Spring day, full of promise that even warmer days for living and playing are coming!

The Rainbows

It was a Sunday in the Fall of 2001 and it was a beauty. The sun shined brightly in the cloudless sky, which was the deep, rich, and endless blue of Fall, rather than the pale blue of Summer. The air had that nice clean and crisp quality to it even though it was warm enough to wear shorts and t-shirt. The day could not be wasted, the sheer beauty of it called us to play.

Sundays are church days and family days. And so we, me, my husband and our two young children, spent our morning in church. I can’t remember now what the sermon was about. I was much more interested in looking out the big windows of the sanctuary. The window closest to me was opened a little and I could feel a breeze float across my skin as I sat in the pew, trying to pay attention. My eyes, though, were drawn to and fascinated by the dancing of the sunlight through the leaves of the big oak and maple trees. I felt that God, the Creator, was teasing me…begging me to come out.

With church and lunch over, it was time for the family to go outside and play! We decided to ride our bikes along the greenbelt path to Bug Light Park. Our ride along the path included the usual casual ride interspersed with our children yelling ‘faster, faster, pedal faster!’ We laugh and laugh and pretend to race. We enter the park via the parking lot and head to the open field and Bug Light. We are greeted with a lovely sea breeze and a stunning view of several sailboats taking advantage of a beautiful day on Casco Bay. We parked our bikes and my eyes, which had been focused upon the water view, gradually shifted to take in the open field where we planned to play tag. I happened to look up and then my mouth practically dropped to the ground. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was a rainbow, actually four of them together. These were no typical rainbows. They didn’t just arch across the sky, they danced whimsically up and down and all around. They weren’t the rainbows that come after the rain, as a reminder of the promise that God will never again destroy the earth. There had been no rain that day, but I felt that through the rainbows I was looking at, God was certainly sending me a message.

There were 24 of them. Four each of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple, sequenced that way four times. Diamond shaped kites, each with matching tails, all connected together as one. Lines going to all kites were attached to a man with a special harness standing in the middle of the field. I was completely in awe and completely delighted. The colors and the movement of the kites against the beautiful sky blue canvas were absolutely mesmerizing. I felt for the second time that day that God was teasing and playing with me. I smiled at the thought and ran off to play tag with my kids, while the rainbow kites played in the wind above us.

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