Rainbows

Most years spring creeps up on me in an exciting, but not altogether novel way. The crocuses are beautiful but unsurprising. Ditto with the warmth. The feeling of "it's spring again, already!" is usually at the fore of my thoughts. This year, something is different. Spring feels new somehow, as if the heat is a shock, the warm rain and the smell of asphalt a rare blessing; The yellow-green willow over the lake the height of beauty, supple and breathtaking in her earliest of robes. Even the forsythias, which I usually find mediocre at best strike me as breathtaking, with a deep and lovely color. I do not feel like spring has come again already. Rather, it seems as though I cannot remember another spring, that this thing called spring is so distant and from such a different life that it may as well have never happened. The red winged blackbirds reappear for the first time, and everything is new, it seems, except the rainbow.

The rainbow which spanned the sky yesterday beckoned to me. I heard the rain start down with the sun still gleaming and I knew that there must be a rainbow. I stood in the warm, sun-filled rain in my apron, looking up at the wonderful and awe-inspiring rainbow remembering. that first time I saw a rainbow at the county fair with friends and managed to hold it for years, a precious omen in my thoughts. The full double, then triple rainbow that arched in the dark, mountainous skies over Lake Issyk-Kul, the most beautiful of landscapes suddenly linked by the bright and glowing arch to the incredible darkness of the gleaming summer skies. I think it is impossible to see a rainbow and not remember. Whether it is God promising no more killing floods or an omen of good luck, it is an incredibly magical experience - and no matter how we think of light breaking through the prisms of tiny droplets, the wonder and beauty of a rainbow in the half-dark spring sky cannot be quantified or explained without appealing to omens.


Garden Journal
In other news, it turns out there was no need to give up hope - my peppers have just germinated after all this time! However, the mold has crept up onto my seedlings. I blame the newspaper pots - all of the other seedlings are just fine, but the ones in newspaper have this mold on them! I will be repotting into plastic soon, and whenever I find my favorite book on dealing with garden pests, I will be concocting a tea to spray on the leaves of the seedlings to ward off the mold and keep them strong. I'll keep you posted