The rainbow's end

You'll find unicorns, pastel castles, princesses with flowy hair and bejeweled crowns, fairies, mermaids and other whimsical beauties in a pack of glittery stickers if you look hard enough. They are happy and bright creatures and objects, earning them a permanent place in 5-year-old, girly girl hearts - where good in life means strawberry shortcake and puppies, and all bad can be solved by a kiss on a boo-boo and some chocolate pudding. Rainbows, by their very nature - delicate and colorful - are inevitably deemed imaginary and given an honorary placement in the land of la-la. 

Somewhere between the "Mat-Bat-Sat" book reports and the Big Books that we as kindergardeners were to take home and have our parents sign , I can still remember the day I learned about rainbows. Over and over, my class recited the rainbow colors in order - Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet. We then used cotton balls dipped in paint and construction paper to create our own rainbows. On the small paper, using my small hands, I formed horseshoes, childishly (though age-appropriately) failing to recognize the profoundness of the colors and how in real life, they seamlessly flow into one another.        

  

Surely throughout my years I have seen rainbows after storms or after midday rain showers. But it wasn't until yesterday that I finally got it.  

I visited a rainbow's end. Actually, it visited me. Now I am not one to believe in signs and I am a firm believer that we make our own destinies, but when I was leaving my house , I walked out my front door and had a majestic view of a rainbow. Normally, I'm lucky to spot a faint line, or perhaps a fragment of one before a cloud intercepts it. But on this particular occasion, I saw an entire one - end to end, unobstructed by any cloud, tree or house.  

The great thing about rainbows is that unlike imaginary friends, everyone can actually see them. Adults don't need to rely on children to verbalize what they are seeing and then piece together the outline. Everyone can appreciate rainbows and know they are staring at the exact same manifestation of light. Even though they can't touch it, they can capture it on film to reconfirm the reality of it all, like I did yesterday with my camera phone. 

After appreciating its beauty, I got in my car to head over to Rachel's house, keeping my eyes on the breathtaking prism of color (and the road, of course).  And then, as if I were day-dreaming, an airplane came flying through the band of color of one of the rainbow's legs and climb higher into the sky (I promise, I could not even make this up!). Dumbfounded, I stopped my car, poked my head out the window like a floppy dog and rubbed my eyes to make sure it wasn't an illusion. I sat there bamboozled until some angry man driving in the lane going opposite my direction honked at me. 

Like I said, I am not one to believe in harbingers. But whether it was science or some higher power, I could swear that rainbow I saw in its entirety and the airplane were signs. It was as though someone had set up a larger-than-life projection screen in the sky, saying "Hey KP! Here's evidence that fairy tales really do exist." I like to believe it was showing me a missing link, the secret to how reality and truth can be mixed with make-believe on special, rare occasions. 

When push comes to shove, fables, myths and tales (supped up with love-at-first-sight, knights in shining armor and happily ever after) are just that - sparkly comfort food for the brain; a snapshot of a perfect reality we as adults are all too often sure cannot actually exist. But where the line gets hazy is when something you'd swear is a fairy tale meets real life. When I can see a complete rainbow. That's enough proof for me. I'll remain a believer and a dreamer so long as I can skip at the rainbow's end.