Morning Rainbows

I’ve never seen a rainbow in the morning. Let me clarify. I have prisms hanging in an easterly window and a westerly window in my house so that I have “dancing rainbows” on the inside walls on sunny mornings and late afternoons. When I see them in the morning, I almost always exclaim, “Rainbows!” and reach out to catch them in the palms of my hands. It’s just a thing that I do because it is a happy way to start the day, full of promise.

BUT, I’ve never seen a natural rainbow spread across the sky in the morning.

I’ve seen sundogs in the late afternoon when conditions are right. I’ve seen the sky and the water below on fire at both sunrise and sunset, when the clouds are just so, and there is a window of clear sky near the horizon beneath the cloud cover. But what is more glorious than a brilliant double rainbow as the sun slides toward the western horizon at the tail end of a shower, so brilliant against the retreating steel gray clouds in the east?

You would think there should be a rainbow once in a while following a shower just after sunrise. Maybe if I were out on a sailboat on the open water, I might see one as I sipped my morning coffee. Are they there? Do I just keep missing them because I’m more likely to be out and looking at day’s end than at O’Dark Thirty in the morning? And would I really be sitting out in the cockpit in the morning drizzle? Not terribly likely, but you never know….

At least I have my dangling crystals creating my dancing rainbows. Yeah. That’s nice, too.