Sunlight refracted into colors through microscopic water droplets directed us off the main road. 

One minute we were driving home to shower, make dinner, and get to bed on time, and then . . . we were not. 

A simple quarter turn left and we headed for the Coast Guard Life Saving Station. The one built nearly a century ago to save lives, now restored for research, a reminder of how times have changed: the pragmatic saving of a single drowning life replaced by theoretical efforts to save a poisoned planet.

We were not the only ones drawn from our path by the prismed light. Others with pointed cameras and raised phones had pulled off to capture the rainbow.

We parked and walked to the bench where I used to sit eating lunch and looking across the marshy inlet toward our distant neighborhood. An eagle could have seen the bench across the way at the end of the road where we run, but our vision falls short- limiting us to imagine what might be out there – waiting for us.

Standing between my twins, grown impossibly tall, we studied the landscape. There was nothing to say, the rainbow filled our quiet.

The showers, dinner, and sleep would have to wait while we stood at the edge of the postcard scene: slanted light, greened grass, rainbowed stripes, and whitecapped ocean.

I hoped I would remember the moment soft focused by time like I remember the afternoon they first rode their bikes training-wheel-free on the dirt road behind our house; like I remember the early fall evening after soccer practice when we lied down in the grass and watched the pink clouds shape-change, and like I remember the first morning we stood close waiting at the end of our street for the school bus.