nighttime snow

Last night I dreamt that it snowed in Beverly Hills. I walked out onto one of the rooftop patios at Myspace and was ecstatic to find snowflakes rapidly falling from the sky and an accumulation of at least a half a foot of snow on the ground. There is only one word to describe what my dream-self did at that very moment – frolic. I ran. I jumped. I spun around. I rolled in the snow. It was MAGICAL.

Then I woke up and found that it was just another boring, partially-grey-partially-sunny, chilly day in LA.

Fast forward to this afternoon when I get an MMS from my BFF in the big V-A with a picture of the piles of snow that fell last night and today in my hometown. It’s like my mind just KNEW it was snowing back home, and wanted to give me some sort of piece of it! I thought it was a little strange that I was dreaming of snow out of the blue. I hadn’t even read a single weather report! Crazy!

It’s been over four years since I moved to LA, and though I’ve seen (quasi-fake) snow at Big Bear, it’s been just as long since I’ve experienced a real, honest-to-goodness snow fall. I miss it so much.

This is advance warning to all of you to quit griping about bad driving conditions, not being able to get to the office, de-icing your car, or ugly gray slushy piles of old snow. Some of us miss it (even the bad parts) beyond belief!

So yeah, isn’t that weird that I dream about rolling around in snow the same night it snows for the first time all season in my hometown?

And then, right when things felt super craptastic, there was a glimmer of hope. Literally. A rainbow.

Lauren called me to the window in our office kitchen to see the most brilliant, bright, thick and vibrant rainbow I have ever seen in my entire life. Almost instantly, my spirits were lifted and my jaw dropped in awe.

It was a full rainbow too, the kind that stretched clear across the sky beyond where the eye can see. The most amazing part, however, was the base, which appeared so close you could reach out and touch it, but was miles and miles away. This was not your average watercolor-esque rainbow, oh no, it looked like a cartoon – it was that bright. I half-expected Rainbow Brite or the Care Bears to come sliding down at any moment.

It’s times like these I wish I had a camera that actually zoomed, not my amateur-status iPhone. Really, these pictures do it no justice.

I ran down the stairs and into the drizzling rain (and nearly broke my neck in my yellow heels) to get a better shot of it, and immediately, it started fading away. By the time I took these photos below, the clouds had already smeared away the top of the rainbow. When I got back inside, the extraordinary colors we are oohing and ahhing over were already starting to bleed back into the dull gray sky.

The rainbow only lasted a couple of minutes, but that’s all we needed. I think we were all meant to see it. There is an important, poetic lesson in here somewhere, but I think for me, it just means to quit griping about all the garbage you think sucks in your life, because life is damn beautiful, just as it is, and even in the worst of situations, there is always something fantastically amazing just waiting for you around the corner.

I hear you, God! Loud & clear.