At my bus stop there are 2 sets of stairs to get up and off the platform. It doesn't matter which staircase you take, the distance is the same and yet, I find myself (perhaps out of habit) taking the same route every day. About midway up the stairs, on the path I always take, the light hits the glass to cast a rainbow that extends over several steps. Even on fairly gloomy mornings only the smallest amount of light needs to hit the glass to refract it so that I'm walking through prismatic rainbows.
It is near impossible to be grumpy when walking through rainbows. They pierce the fog and dance along nerves until cheeks are involuntarily tightening and the corners of lips are tilting upwards. I like the way it sets my day. But this morning I thought about the fact that I always walk the same path and decided to try something different, to walk the other path and see if it too is strewn with rainbows. It's not. And I felt it apt, that not every pathway is bright and colourful. But I missed my rainbow so I walked back down so that I could walk back up through it, and the tiny scattered ones that touch my shoes and litter my steps as I walk by.
Sometimes it is only the rainbows that get me through the day. Or the coolness of the air as it chills my fingers and ears and nose. Or wind off the river as I walk to my bus stop. Or the fact that I can wear scarves. Long soft scarves in bright colours that snuggle around my neck and tickle my ears.
On days where I look at multi-traumas all day and diagnose unexpected lung cancers, sometimes I need rainbows.
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