promises

promises
Originally uploaded by rod lewis

Last night at sunset, I rode through Memphis and across the Mississippi River into Arkansas. Fifteen minutes later, I set up the tent and crashed. Seven hundred miles and 14 hours astride the Windhorse had taken its toll. That’s about 5 hours before bedtime for me. In fact, I woke up fully dressed in my nasty road clothes at 5:30 this morning, climbed out of the tent in a slight drizzle, and headed for the shower. Yes, I’m really roughing it!
When I returned from the shower, the sun was beginning to come up in the clear eastern sky, but it was still raining. Another degree above the horizon and the soft sun cast its rays through the rain around me and projected a rainbow above my head in the still-dark sky.

Somehow, a rainbow signifies that everything is as it should be. It doesn’t mean that everything is peachy, but as it should be. Trust is a very difficult skill to master. We begin each year, start each week, wake each day, and pour each morning cup with expectations, goals and destinations. When the unexpected arises, or obstacles block our paths, we become discouraged. But it’s like my (imaginary) friend Neil Peart says, “it’s not as if that barricade blocks the only road.” That’s what a rainbow says.
So when I arrived in Arkansas last night, road-beaten, sticky, and sore, got beat up more by the freshly eroded Arkansas exit ramps and service roads, set up the tent in the worst mosquito infestation I’ve EVER seen, and woke to rain, you can imagine how welcome a reminder was the rainbow that framed my tent as the sun began to rise.
So as the rain drizzled its last, I sat down to scribble at the laptop and wait for the tent to dry, content that regardless of obstacles, change of plans, bad weather, or rude people, I will accept the journey and realize that having never been there before, my expectations weren’t quite in line with reality.
In a perfect world, we would trust.

Sorry I missed:
Loretta Lynn’s Coalminer’s Daughter Kitchen Museum
Hi’s Berkenstock and Cigar Superstore