Dreaming of Unwinter

The rain was coming down heavy outside, beyond the office window. All was silent but for the sound of trees pawing with their pruned-finger branches at the side of our red bricked building, begging to be let in out of the cold; the misery. I looked from the wall clock to the window beaded with rain drops, then to the coat I chose to wear today, a mock leather, spring jacket, without a hood. Dread and laziness took me. Winter, go away.

At the right moment, when the clock told me I’d worked long enough, I rose slowly and put on my pleather coat and dragged myself out of the office, down the stairs, through the hall and finally, through the heavy double doors, into the pouring rain. Damn.

I walked, and walked some more--my eyes down, watching for puddles to avoid. Something happened then and though I hadn’t acknowledged it with my conscious mind, I perceived it none the less. At a molecular level, my body, the cells, started wiggling a bit faster with excitement. Then my sensory districts began to broadcast alerts, yellow, orange, red. My nose sent a message: the air had become more fragrant. My skin sent a message: remember the way spring touches? My sight grew brighter as photons flooded my retinas.

The sun was shining!

I looked up and became a weather man, “this won’t last forever.” And with out a PhD in meteorology, I must admit, it was only a guess. But a smart guess based on observation. The patch of blue sky was tiny and quickly being torn apart by swiftly moving storm clouds. The gap in the gray was like a tornado of still, sweet-smelling June air extending down around only me.

On the horizon, breaking upon the roof tops of homes on a distant hill top, shone a dense rainbow.

I blinked and found I was no longer walking on a city street but was instead walking through a wood with a lawn of moss under my feet. I was clothed differently as well, in deep blue flowing robe made of a strange but soft synthetic material. The rainbow was still beaming but instead of falling on the roofs of track housing, it landed on a great white walled castle, a city powered by the energy of the rainbow. And in the valley beyond the wood, in the shadow of the hill, was farm land. And workers dressed in beautiful green robes tilled and harvested the land. And I could see, walking on thin whispy clouds, men in orange robes, the harvesters of the sky. My eye site was keen, and I could see far, all the way into the distant halls of the city on the hill where men in purple robes governed and wrote in books made of light. And there were women in red robes dancing in the cities parks, painting and playing musical instruments. Still another group of people, outfitted in yellow, were studying the rainbow, channeling it through thin glass cables to all the corners of the city. The people in yellow robes were also the priest and tended the temples and the fires that burned within them. And a white light radiated from the peoples faces and over the valley and from inside the trees.

I was glad that winter was over.