You have to endure the rain to enjoy the rainbow

“Mom, it looks like it’s going to rain, we should not be going for a walk right now,” warned my twelve-year-old daughter. 

“It’s done raining,” I reassured. “Let’s just go. Get some fresh air.” Neither she nor our thirteen-year-old son were really happy about it, but off we went. 

It was Saturday of the long weekend, the whole family was home, and no one wanted to leave the house. Almost everyone had been some kind of sick. Hubby had come down with COVID mid-week, just days after his team’s last football game. Weirdly, this is exactly what happened in 2021. Back then, COVID infection was all the drama. Now that he and everyone has been vaccinated and boosted, it’s just another annoying respiratory virus, and his team is all the drama. 

I just got my booster too, but, we realized that we’d forgotten about the kids. I know, we’re terrible parents. It just kept falling off the to-do list. So we scrambled to schedule some shots. We figured if their bodies could generate antibodies fast enough, they wouldn’t get sick. The pharmacy offered both flu and Covid boosters at the same time. Great idea! I thought, Who knows when we’ll get around to the flu shots if we don’t do it now? 

Welp, it was a heck of a lot of antigens, and our daughter had a bad reaction. High fevers, chills, headaches, nausea. She spent two schooldays in bed with a vomit bucket by her side and a cool compress on her forehead, not eating, not watching television. Our son had a milder version of this, but slogged to school anyways. Meantime, Hubby actually had COVID and probably should have been in bed, but there was too much going on with his football team in the immediate postseason, so he pushed himself through numerous interviews and Zoom calls, writing blogs and posting to social media. 

So there it was Saturday, and no one wanted to even move. And it was rainy. Really really rainy. We’d just had a bad storm causing wind and flooding along the coast, blowing our stuff around the backyard, rainwater in the basement. 

By 3 pm, the weather had cleared. It was all of a sudden 57 degrees and sunny! No one had yet stepped foot out the door besides me and the dog, and everyone was finally feeling better. We decided– or rather, I decided– to do a family dog-walk down the road and around the pond. And so we did, with the kids protesting that it was probably going to rain, and me insisting that no way was it going to rain. 

We made it down to the water and it was beautiful, with geese and ducks and even a busy beaver swimming by. Then, of course, it started raining. It was just cold sprinkles at first, but then it downpoured. Laughing and whooping, we sprinted and made it to the road just as it stopped. The sun was low in the sky but it brightened up a lot and quickly. “Look for the rainbow!” called our daughter. 

And there it was:

And what a rainbow! We had never seen such a neon rainbow. A double one, too. Briefly triple. Cars pulled over, and drivers got out to take pictures. We all stood in awe. 

“So, what makes a rainbow?” I asked. We all knew it had something to do with light hitting water and being refracted, like in a prism. But why was this particular rainbow so freaking bright? I couldn’t resist Googling it. Maybe everyone already knows all this but I found it fascinating: 

Soooo sunlight is made up of these energy particles called photons. When photons hit a raindrop, they move through it, but because water is denser than air, they slow down. Here’s the critical thing, though– photons have different wavelengths, so they move at different speeds through the water. We can only perceive certain wavelengths, and the wavelengths we can see make up the entire spectrum of color. The shorter wavelength photons (which make blue) travel faster than the longer wavelength photons (which make red). So the photons get split up by wavelength within the raindrop, divided into the spectrum of the colors of the rainbow. This then gets reflected off of the other side of the raindrop back at us, which is what we see. Like this:

(Except that raindrops are spherical, not teardrop-shaped. But, the image gets the point across– and it’s really cool, right?)

Why was this one so bright? In order to see a rainbow, you have to have the sun behind you and the rain in front of you. The more perfect the angles, the more of the arc you will see. The brighter the sun, the more intense the colors. We had perfect conditions for a full, neon rainbow!

Anyways, the clouds came back and the show ended. As we walked back home, I asked the kids “How should I write about this?” 

My daughter said, “You know that saying, you have to endure the rain to enjoy the rainbow? Definitely use that.” 

It’s a cliche, but it sort of fits. This outing was an effort– more so for some of us– and we got wet, but we were all so glad. We breathed fresh air! We walked the dog! There was free entertainment! Everyone’s mood went up a million.

Here, a photo the kids took of me and the dog:

No filters on these rainbow shots, either!