When Delia came home from work tonight she burst in hollering for me to come here come down come out COME SEE THE RAINBOW!
If I’ve learned anything in this century, it’s that camera phone photos rarely do beautiful moments justice. This one was so strangely deep and thick and fuzzy … denser than a trick of light, like you could walk through it a long way and just be completely surrounded for the distance of a city block by static made of grey and rainbow colors made more magical by the golden hour glow.
In some ways it felt like a reassuring sign after a fraught conversation with a friend this morning about our unclear but certainly scary tax debts.
In another way it felt like of course it is time for another rainbow brought to me by my wife! Like wherever she goes it’s quite likely a rainbow will follow.
It is a beautiful thing to realize at this point in my life I’ve probably seen the majority of rainbows with my wife. If not physically with her, than for sure WITH-her, with her. Like one page away in our stickerbook of life, and about to pop over to my page like an animated Disney character in a drawing room.
*****
We have to get up really early tomorrow and she didn’t feel like eating, so instead of having a bedtime snack together, we had a before-bed stretch. We turned on some Hearts of Space music — HOS.com PGM No. 1346, “a journey in the sinuous soundworlds of India” — and stretched and noodled around for ten or fifteen minutes; it was lovely, pleasurable, and super-beneficial.
At one point when we were stretching I looked up and saw her face, and her hair was all curly and bodiful, and she had an open kind of soft airhead smile on her face, and looked like a fucking cheerleader — like as much a Sweet Valley High cover-girl character as Charlize Theron in Young Adult, and nowhere near fifty-something — that I was just kind of stunned for a couple seconds.
We don’t dance around or stretch as much as we used to. We can feel the consequences in our aging bodies, but we also feel a ton of relief (and hope, consequently) when we do make the time for it. Even five minutes or one song of wiggling our bodies usually results in feeling vastly better than you’d expect a mere five or fifteen minutes would make us feel.
I wish everyone were this lucky. And aware of, and grateful for it.
I don’t know if anything in the world makes me measurably more happy than seeing Delia happy. She is good fortune to be around.