What they saw

This morning there are signs everywhere of the storm passing.  Branches pulled from trees, leaves pulled from branches, and a fish pulled from the lake and dropped far up the beach.

He seemed to be watching his world recede.  Dropped here by a gull or flung up by a wave, he was stranded by forces beyond his control.

It’s still blowing, and the wind is spitting bits of rain, but the rage has gone out of it.  We have power–though never as much as we think, eh?

I can never get the horizon straight.  At least this morning I have a good excuse.  I was standing at a sharp angle, leaning into the wind.  I was trying to capture the waves, and the roiling clouds when it occurred to me that something else was trying to get my attention.  Well will you look at that.

Gram told me Noah saw a rainbow.  She never said what happened after that.  He must have been a busy guy, Noah.  Getting everybody off the ark, tending to all that livestock.  After being cooped up so long, the people must have been quarrelsome.  They probably set off in a dozen different directions just trying to get a little peace away from each other.  And I can’t imagine the lions and tigers leaving the goats and sheep alone, so there you go.  I rather imagine Mrs. Noah baring her teeth and chasing the predators away from the cattle and the chickens.  A busy time of it.  I don’t know whether Noah watched the rainbow fade, as rainbows do. 

But I’m sure that once the family had a moment to sit down on dry land, they took one last look.

A promise is a promise.