THE GIRL WHO COULD SEE RAINBOWS
“Poppy, there’s a rainbow in your glasses!”
The tinny voice of a small five-year-old redheaded urchin focused my wandering mind. I stopped at the door, looked down over the armchair in the living room at Jessica, who was smiling cheek to cheek.
“What?” I asked.
“There’s a rainbow in your glasses!” Jessica repeated.
I looked beyond her at the morning cloudless sun beaming in and realized that my Coke-bottle-bottom eyeglasses must have been picking up the sun and tossing its rays into a prismatic wonderland for Jessica’s eyes only.
I grinned and beamed her smile back at her, enjoying the moment.
Then, it was out the door and to the car, a toddling lunchpail-carrier at my side, her fist tightly holding a damp quarter for milk.
Some mornings Jessica can’t seem to remember how to strap herself into the seat, other times she defiantly does it herself and don’t you try to help her. This time, just for a test, she claimed she didn’t know how and I had to lean over her jelly-mustachioed face to grab the strap and pull it over her lap.
The radio shot war words at my belly, and I decided to turn it off for a while.
“Why’d you do that?” Jessica again.
“What?” Me again.
Jessica: “Why’d you turn off the radio?”
I grunted and listened instead to the sunshine and watched closely the asphalt whooshing under the car, humming a song about the sunny side of the street.
Jessica looked over me and beyond my shiny pate to the sun that was racing alongside the car, making the east all yellow and white.
“The sun is on the sunny side of the street,” she remarked with hand-clapping delight.
So it is, so it is.
How can you maintain an early-morning bad mood when there’s so much sunshine coming at you from inside the car, as well as from without?
We maneuvered the cool white vehicle to the front of the school, I punched the button to release Jessica’s seat belt, yelled “I love you!” to the red streak, who turned for a second, repeated what I’d just said, and disappeared into the sunshiny morning air.
Here’s hoping your grumbly morning finds you with a rainbow in your glasses
(c) 2010 A.D. by Jim Reed