It started raining this afternoon so I found this essay which I wrote in 2006. I learned later that the rainbow Len and I saw appeared just as the daughter of friends was marrying her husband in a backyard wedding a couple miles from where we lived.
Here in 2026 our neighbors brought home their new baby this summer. Two minutes after he arrived here a rainbow arched over our whole street.
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Speaking of dogs (weren't we?), Sally arrived into our family last weekend. She's more Australian shepherd than not and she is eight years old. Her person had to move into a nursing home. Intermediate friends have been looking for a good home for her and here we were, a hundred miles from where she was, and karma got us.
Sally is tentative, anxious, quiet, has amber fur, amber eyes, and seems to love adult women best. I arrived home from errands about five minutes after she got here. When she heard my voice she immediately trotted over to herd my legs. She's a full-hearted sheepherder and I am her newest and biggest sheep.
So this is part of the background of my rainbow story. You know … where animals appear two by two? We now have a brand new second-hand dog plus our original base station Becky. Two dogs and an ark. What else does one need?
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It was late last Saturday afternoon. My husband was sitting on the sofa with seventy-pound Dobermanish shepherd Becky sprawled next to him, her thunderously huge head snoring on his lap.
I was lounging sideways in my Big Chair. Sally was nervously perched close to me, ready, I presume, to save me from leaping into ravines or thickets.
Len and I were drinking some pretty good grocery store Chianti, puckering down some pretty good grocery store Pecorino cheese. All the kids were grown up and moved out, or over at a friend's house, doing homework.
We'd been talking for a while.
It had been rainy and darkish all day.
I glanced out the window.
A patch of pure sunlight, off to the east, startled my eyes.
You know what I mean. The world is a gloomy, sooty Dickens novel until some startling moment when you see a sun-soaked spot of color. You lean forward.
"Hey, there's sunshine out there on a tree!"
Right then, more sunshine poured onto more trees.
We grabbed our wine glasses and headed for the porch.
Evening was sailing in like a boat coming into a harbor on a pretty little breeze. The tops of all the trees in the neighborhood were lighting up from the setting sun. The air was moist around us from days of drizzle.
My husband asked, "I wonder if there will be a rainbow...." and one appeared. High, faint in the sky, a ghostly shimmer of colored light.
We kept watching. Like a cheap ending, the colors intensified. Rosy rose, see-thru blue, a skinny layer of verdigris, a band of violet.
What first occurred to me as I stared at the rainbow shapeshifting from nothing into Kindergarten art, was this. A rainbow doesn't look natural. Our eyes are used to the organic nature of nature shaped by slow growth, dry years, flood, accidents, and hardship. We are used to dog fur hues, the blending greens of leave, trees, copses, the emerald of grass, the shadow of pines. We're comfortable with imperfectly gorgeous flowers, a punctuation of bird feathers, meandering rivulets through mud, the way clouds pile and scud across the sky in palettes of whites and silver.
A rainbow is unnaturally weird. Always the same. Those irreducible colors. That perfect arch that you never see in things that grow or tumble or weather away.
A double rainbow appeared under the first rainbow. Then another materialized high and pale over the bright one. I kept watching, wondering if the whole sky would break into stripes.
And then I started wondering what it was like to be Noah. Before one knew the "Arky-Arky" song. Before we "knew" rainbows mean importantly religious God promises. Before we knew the physics lesson that rainbows are light breaking into parts through a prism of water drops.
What would it be like to look up and see a rainbow bridging from one side of everything you know, to the other? It must have been something. Those brilliantly curved transparencies that are utterly different from everything we tramp across in our muddy, bumbling world.
But as I thought about it some more what continued to hold my thoughts was this.
The coolest mystery is not what rainbows are. But what we are.
We are beings who need to know what a thing means. We see something inexplicable; we mull it over. We fuss. We tell a story, spin out a tale, hammer that mystery into some metaphor for how it feels to be us.
Our ancients kept seeing those rainbows after rain when the air shimmers, when earth smells the ozone scent of life. The sky goes from too dark to too light and then there might be a rainbow.
There must have been a thousand rainbow stories told over time and space.
Look at the one that stuck. There was a Big Being. He got disgusted with the selfish casualness of too many of earth's beings and set a flood to clear us out. Along the way She saved one eccentric family plus all earth's wild, lovely animals.
This is the kicker dénouement to the story we kept.
When the world was saved, the Big Being said, "Never again. I will never wipe it all out this way again."
When the ancients didn't understand what was going on the story they told and the story we still choose to hear is this one. A story that starts with disgust and ends with grace and mercy.
Human life on earth is plagued with wicked meanness. But we also have, right here in the middle of us, affection, endurance, and a passion to live lives that are worthy.
We are bowled over by the circus of sweet old dogs and all the other awesome, beautiful, wacky animal life around us. By birds and peace. By the way life feels when we finally come through a siege of grief.
We have chosen, by the story we kept, to look upon rainbows as reminders to seek rightness and be thankful.
That we are not the first people to need this assurance and reminder - this comforts me.
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