Winter Rainbow

What we fail to see when we fail to look

Christmas Eve morning, the sky breaks open. For a long time, it stays this way, the colors painted on the pale heavens will remain for quite some time. In the haze of winter, crystalized air acts like tiny prisms, shaping a kind of unlikely silence. The creak of my car’s tires on snow-covered streets, and the usual hum and grunt of street traffic falls to zero. The visual overtakes the audible. Like a dream, the sky becomes magical, and in the upward light from the sun on one of its weakest days, tiny flurries fall like glitter.

Alone in my car, I pull over to the curb for a better view and click a photo on my phone. The winter rainbow has awakened something in me. Does anyone else see this? I suddenly remember what day it is but dismiss the obvious and sentimentalized symbolism of seeing a perfect light in the distant sky. I try also not to place too much weight on the rainbow’s eternal promise of good luck, hope, and peace. I want to, but I’m not that easily swayed.

A winter rainbow is rare but not unusual, although I don’t recall ever seeing one. Sundogs, they are sometimes called. The name comes from their seemingly close proximity to the sun. Although they are millions of miles apart, the winter rainbow appears to be sitting right beside the sun like a loyal dog. Maybe that’s what this is about? The loyalty of family and friends, the ones that mean the most to us at this time of year, the connective emotional tissue the season embodies. But I know I’m trying too hard. The sundog is simply nature being nature.

A few years ago, I experienced a double rainbow above the vast red soil in the wide-open spaces of the Navajo Nation. One came and then a second. I had been on a long road trip with my two sons, and we had stopped at a vast vista outside the Grand Canyon. The sun warmed the light rain falling against the backdrop of maroon mountains, blue sky, and the silvery gray of summer rain clouds. Inexplicably, I started to cry. Was I simply overwhelmed by the beauty of the moment or was it something bigger, some epiphany? It’s easy to turn the glory of an unexpected yet natural occurrence into what we might need at that moment, what our soul or heart longs for. We search for meaning in the everyday that gives us hope. I stood along an old wooden fence along a dusty road nursing tears until the two rainbows disappeared. I’m still uncertain why I was so emotional, but I’ve never forgotten it.

For many minutes I sit in my car and watch the sky. The winter rainbow glistens like an ornament on a tree, hanging still in the air. A car moves past me; a salt truck rumbles by. Do you see it? Another car and then another. Don’t you see the rainbow? I’m reminded how as a boy I loved finding a rainbow after a summer storm, as if I had been the first to discover it. Did you see the rainbow? I’d ask my friends, my father, my mother, anyone who would share with me the unexpected magic I had found.

Out the passenger-side window, I see a man and a shovel. His watchman’s cap is pulled over his ears and eyebrows. The collar of his big black coat is up. He wears ankle–high boots, and his gloves make his hands look oddly large. He works at the icy snow on the walkway in front of a home decorated with a man-sized candy cane near the front door and a 10-foot tall, inflated snowman in the yard. I hear the struggle, the muted scrapes of hard plastic on frozen ground. Although I cannot hear his sighs and heavy breathing, I know they are there. For a moment, he leans against his shovel and rests, surveying what is left to clear. Look up, I say to myself. Look at what is in the sky. He can’t hear me, of course, and he does not turn his eyes upward. Instead, the man returns to his work and a few more digs at the crusty snow. After only a minute or so, he leans again on his shovel, looks again at what remains, shrugs, and walks to the home’s open garage with the shovel in hand, and disappears as the door slowly closes.

I pull the car into the street and head for home, keeping my eyes on the sky, the rainbow still there, still shining.