Have you ever searched the skies and looked for a rainbow after a summer storm?
Rainbows have always fascinated me. I search the sky for them often after a rainstorm.
“The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain,” shared Dolly Parton some years ago: I’m thinking maybe she was on to something.
Dolly saw many rainbows in her 80 years of life, and she left us the other day in search of “where rainbows never die.“
Jelly Roll, a popular singer today, perhaps gave Dolly the greatest accolade when he said:
“She might be the last American that everyone liked.”
Dolly, was indeed, a most popular entertainer over the years, and her songs and voice were likened to some special melodious Robin announcing the arrival of spring.
In Greek mythology, the Goddess Iris is said to ‘“travel on the rainbow while carrying messages from the gods to mortals.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson reminded us too that “the sky is the daily bread of the eyes.”
After the summer thunderstorm and downpour of raindrops on the trees and flowers below, I have always rejoiced knowing that those drops of water on my tin roof represent a special gift, and soon a rainbow will rise in the sky above.
Few people have seen the beginning or ending of a rainbow although Irish lore suggests there is a pot of gold awaiting you at the end.
The rains that have fallen this year have awarded the farmers with crops unusually good during these summer months.
And often I have seen that beauty of a rainbow with its majestic multiple-layered colors stretching across the sky after these nourishing rains.
Most recently, I was listening to a song by Chris Stapleton and the Steel Drivers called “Where Rainbows never die.”
It is a song that has a special meaning for me far beyond any rainbow that you may have seen.
Permit me to explain.
Stapleton and the Steel Drivers sing a song of life gone by and now the words tell of a future journey:
I’m an old man now, I’m bound for glory
Time to lay these burdens down
Had enough of this old world of worry
Gonna trade my troubles for a crown.
As I was listening to this song, I remembered a special rainbow I had seen over Sharpsburg three years ago. I had left the Little Brick Coffee shop drinking some hot java under a heavy rainstorm, and while driving into Sharpsburg, I saw a huge spreading rainbow appear over the town.
I enjoy taking pictures and proceeded to the Antietam battlefield to get some shots of the rainbow behind the statutes from my iPhone. The shots were amazing. I snapped more than a few.
And as I left the avenues to head home, the heavy rainfall continued.
My wife, Sheila, and I used to walk these avenues for years, and Sheila had died in late July 2023, and I have her ashes on my fireplace mantle. I speak to her softly as I walk by that mantle.
The song’s lyrics tells of an old man’s departure from this life as Stapleton sings another verse:
I will make my way across the field of cotton
And wade through muddy waters one last time
And in my dreams, I come out clean
When I reach the other side
West of where the sun sets, where rainbows never die.
As I departed those battlefield avenues on my way home, I looked at the beauty of the rainbow as my wipers moved the falling raindrops from my car window.
And although my wife had died about a month before this rainbow above had appeared, I was speaking out loud to her and said, “You know, Sheila, I talk to you most days, but have no way to know if you ever hear me.”
“Maybe you could send me some kind of sign?” I spoke.
I went home, parked my car in the driveway and was sitting there waiting for the rain to slow before I got out. I was checking my Facebook page too, and my neighbor Donna had posted a picture there, and said:
“Look the end of the rainbow in front of Pete’s house.”
Indeed, the end of the rainbow went into the ground directly in front of my house.
A question answered from far away, I thought.
End of rainbow in front of my house
