A Little Rainbow Story

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Back at the very end of the 1980s my wife and I, along with our 3-year-old daughter, moved from New Mexico to Oregon. We were moving to the town of Ashland which we had heard about, read about and investigated. We were moving there blindly. We knew nobody there, had no jobs lined up and no home lined up. (We did things like that back then.) We rented a big U-Haul truck, packed everything into it and headed across the great American West. It was an incredible trip. We stopped at numerous places along the way to sight-see. By the time we finally made it to Oregon we were exhausted and in a hurry to get to Ashland. I decided to get off the main highways and take a lesser road across the mountains. On the map it looked a lot shorter. Well, it turned out to be the tiny, narrow, pothole-marred road from hell. We ended up climbing way up into the mountains, through pristine forest, and then down again. The road dropped in altitude at a very precipitous pace. Halfway down the mountain it started to rain. With the very steep incline, the brakes on the truck started smoking. I started feeling like we were on a runaway train. The road was wet and slippery and I was constantly pumping the breaks to keep from reaching dangerous speeds down the steep incline off the mountain. We finally reached the bottom and the intersection with the main highway. There was a sign indicating that we should turn right to go to Ashland. The sign said that it was only 7 miles ahead. We were greatly relieved to be on level road again as well as being so close to our destination after driving for several days. I turned onto the highway and headed towards Ashland. The rain soon turned into a genuine cloudburst. I've been through countless cloudbursts in my life but this one was a real doozy. The rain just kept getting heavier and heavier. The windshield wipers could barely keep up. I was driving very slowly because the visibility was greatly reduced because of the torrential rain. Eventually, I could not see more than about 30 feet in front of the truck so I did the sensible thing and pulled off onto the shoulder of the road and parked in order to wait out the storm. With the rain pounding down on the truck it was like being inside a kettle drum. My wife, daughter and I silently looked at each other. After about 10 minutes the rain suddenly began decreasing in intensity. I turned the windshield wipers back on so that we could see out the truck. Very quickly, the rain almost stopped completely and the sun suddenly came out. To our amazement we realized that we were parked directly in front of a road sign that read, "Ashland City Limits." We realized that we had arrived. We were only about 20 yards from entering the town to which we were moving. We all smiled. And then...... Suddenly a rainbow appeared in the sky. It was a very rich and vibrant rainbow. And it arched directly over the Ashland City Limits sign! My wife and I looked at each other with opened mouths while our daughter proclaimed, "Yippee, a rainbow!" As I looked into my wife's eyes I knew that she was thinking the exact same thing that I was thinking. The rainbow was a sign. You see, it had happened to us before. A couple of years before we had moved from one town in New Mexico to another. As we drove into that new town a rainbow was in the sky above that town. Our time in that town was nothing short of special and we took that rainbow above the Ashland City Limits sign to be a sign that our time in Ashland would be special, too. And it was. I have always believed in rainbows. It happened again (sort of) a few years later when we left the rainy, soggy, sun-deprived Pacific Northwest and moved back to the desert Southwest. We moved to New Mexico again and began searching for a small town to move to. With our daughter about to enter kindergarten we wanted to settle down in a town for the duration of our daughter's school years. We visited numerous towns in New Mexico but none of them seemed right. Then one weekend we decided to travel up north to Colorado and visit some towns there. After a long day of searching towns we decided to call it a day before returning to New Mexico. We did not find a town we liked. We decided to stop in the next town and get a room in the first motel we could find. As we entered that next town the very first motel we saw was a motel called, "Rainbow Motel!" My wife and I looked at each other with that same recognition in our eyes. We stopped and got a room. The next day, instead of immediately driving back to New Mexico we took a tour of that town and we immediately fell in love with it. We ended up moving to that town and we lived there for 18 years. It wasn't a real rainbow we saw entering that town but it was still a "rainbow sign." We believed in rainbows and we followed rainbows but these 3 rainbow incidents were preceded by a different rainbow incident. It was in early October a few years earlier and my wife and I were living in Santa Fe. She was nine months and nine days pregnant. We had already gone through 2 false labors and the baby was late. When I got a call at work from my wife I thought, "Okay, this better be for real." I rushed home and we called a cab. As we drove up into the hospital complex I was looking out the window of the cab and there in the sky above the hospital was a gorgeous rainbow! But even this was not the beginning of it all. Back when my wife and I were 7 months pregnant we were diligently researching names for our baby-to-be. We came up with a powerful and unique first name and then finally came up with a middle name. The middle name we chose was a foreign language word...... ...... a foreign language word which meant, "rainbow."