Rainbow Connection

One of my favourite memories of being a little girl was mum driving around the Waikato with my brother and I in the back of the car, chasing rainbows. It must have been before the first oil shocks of the seventies; certainly I never felt I could justify such joyriding with my daughter- sorry Louise. In retrospect, she was escaping the claustrophobia of a rainy day at home with two bored kids. But I loved the romance of our quest, even though we never managed to find the end of the rainbow and its promised pot of gold with leprachaun.

Until yesterday I thought it was actually impossible to find the end of the rainbow- it's always going to be at a distance because of angles and refractions and other things I learned at school but immediately forgot.

But yesterday my neighbour, Sean, had a rainbow in the car with him as he drove to work! He was driving out of our drizzley valley with the sun still low in the sky. A rainbow arching from the road in front of him caught his eye and as he drove towards it didn't behave like rainbows usually do- hovering tantalisingly in the distance. He looked out his window and could see the other foot of the arch in the paddock beside him. Then he drove through the road end of the rainbow and for a few seconds the car was filled with colour.