Window

April 24. Evening.

 

Glancing through the window of my childhood home. Something.

 

Oddly compelled, I wandered outside to experience it. Birds, shadows, peace. A set of throaty, beloved rainclouds teased from the heavens, but so far their only offering to the bright green world was the occasional breath of mist.

 

Then I noticed what had drawn me out: a brilliant rainbow - flirting double - peaking above the woods to the East: a sudden, perfect crown for my spirit’s oldest and most sacred temple of oaks and sycamores and elms. Amazed, I gradually made my way towards it, my eyes fixed on a vivid and fleeting gift that hovered over the columns.

 

As if held in another reality, complete with the deceleration of time, I drifted out to the middle of the street, from where I beheld the entire majestic body of the rainbow. Blessed rain began to whisper.

 

There it sat, perched above the woods - my woods - framing the emerald empire like an incandescent arch, seemingly closer than possible. An ethereal hand stayed my movement further, as if to contain me in that place, and in an instant a truth emerged: it wasn’t just me fixed in a trance; the two of us were locked in the embrace of a solemn gaze at one another. Rain and chills. A greater moment I had never known.

 

That’s when a true treasure was born.

 

As the whispering accelerated, maturing to a low cheer, the borders of the rainbow rapidly began to fade, the body of color marrying the azure beyond. Smiling, grateful beyond, I moved to shuffle, step by mindful step, back towards the house. But before reaching cover, saturated, I felt another curious compulsion: to stop. And look again. Another something.

 

It was the end of the rainbow.  Its light was so close that in moving a mere fraction forward, it had formed in front of the woods. My woods.

 

And the end? The pot of gold?

 

Yes, from all the legends and through all the tales, a triumphant cry of dreams among ages, today revealed in full as truth.

 

The base of the great tree. The tree.

 

Having stood defense over my soul an entire generation, silently serving as inspiration for countless stories, anecdotes, and lessons on self and resiliency and integrity, alive for all time as a towering character in a flagship trilogy of adventure novels, now an overgrown bark shell crawled over with ivies and vines, on this day in its decay it yet held open a gateway to the forest sanctuary - the passageway I had cut in childhood and maintained across time. A body-sized cove into a wooded creek that I alone would ever know the true value of.

 

I witnessed the end of the rainbow. Its climax sank into the source of my beautiful imagination, the greatest treasure of all.

 

And then it too faded from view.

 

Having glanced through a window to receive something too special for language, I returned to the house, intoxicated with joy. As I did so, I noticed the cheering subtly but swiftly hush behind me and the breath of mist move back in among chittering wrens and hypnotizing shadows and profound serenity, and I knew that the benedictory echoes of a universal whisper would, from this evening forward, resonate within the sanctum of my heart, for the duration of its miraculous rhythm.