I lived in New Mexico with my now husband for a few years when he was in graduate school.

It’s true that it’s always sunny. Except for during monsoon season, when it literally dumps rain from the sky for only a couple of hours in the afternoon—and then is immediately sunny again.

The streets flood because there isn’t the need for a drainage system for almost 11 months out of the year.

However, the desert earth dries up so quickly that’s it’s only problematic for what feels like a few minutes anyways.

I’ve never seen more rainbows in my life.

My favorites to behold were these little rainbows that weren’t connected to visible clouds and that were the strangest shape of an asymmetrical diamond. Their colors were intense, and stood out even more against the backdrop of this cloudless blue sky and the orange, layered mountains superimposed against it.

What’s not true, though, is that there’s no green in New Mexico.

The variations and shades present would make your eyes water.

I cried a lot in New Mexico.

Sometimes out of loneliness, sometimes out of awe, and sometimes for reasons that weren’t always very clear to me, unlike that blue desert sky.

One thing that I learned is that I love the rain; that I need it, in fact.

At first, I thought it was because I’m an Ohio girl at heart. A midwesterner. Someone who likes seasons. Yet, it’s not.

I realized that I need the rain because I’m moody. A rainy day allows me to remain inside—both literally and metaphorically—holed up in my little safe fortress while the world has temporarily gone mad.

It makes my own moments of madness seem normal too—those times when we need to release what’s pent up inside so that the sun can come out and, not only shine once more but, bring with it those beautiful rainbows, made from our returned light hitting our tears.

My own temperamental colors often remind me of a prism.

I know that there’s a piece of me (typically, I call it my soul) that is ever present, ever stable, and steady. This part of me that isn’t moved, swayed or even touched, really, by my life’s circumstances. Still, my life, my body, my mind, my emotions—these things all contort this constant internal energy, so that at different times and to different people I appear…differently.

Sometimes I’m sunny and warm and friendly and light-hearted. While others, I’m serious, and frustrated and not sure that I like people very much at all.

We all have phases that we move through and facets that are cut and polished by our weathering situations that we must endure—not unlike those spectacularly enchanted New Mexican mountains.

I do miss that nearly permanent sunshine from time-to-time, but more than this, I miss the smells. I carry scents with me for a long time.

My childhood smells like Ivory soap and grass.

My daughter smells sweet, like honey mixed with her newborn sweat.

That cold, crisp New Mexican air on my morning runs smelled like fresh, bold herbs, lavender-tinted flowers and dirt—and, maybe I’m crazy, but rainbows.

What do rainbows smell like?

Their essence is a combination of dreams mixed with the sunshine that we carry inside all of us, made more powerful and bright by the tears that we’ve shed, by the water that occasionally leaks from our eyes, and from our hearts.

I need that part of me—the one that’s, from time to time, frustrated and angry and hurt—because it helps me see the beauty of my life, and of my own soul, after the ground dries up and the soil is firm and solid beneath me once again.

“Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.”

~ Rabindranath Tagore

 

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Ed: Bryonie Wise

{Photo: Slim Paley via Kathy on Pinterest}