At the End of the Rainbow - Robin J. Hineline (digital e reader TXT) 📗

I was young, about eighteen, fresh out of high school, and ready to set the world on fire. I had so many ideals, so many hopes for a bright exciting future life. Despite all my expectations and dreams, this particular fall day was not what I had in mind for my life.
My high school sweetheart and I had married that past summer, shortly after graduation. He was in the U.S. Navy on the USS Forestall and was out to sea for six months. I was living with my parents and siblings in the family home until he returned to Norfolk, Virginia, being due in port in February. I had spent the entire summer looking for work as a secretary. It was what I had decided in school I wanted to do, so I took all the offered business courses and endured three years of typing time trials. After three months of applying for jobs, interviews, and no success at being hired, my self-esteem was lower than normal and disillusion had set in. My parents wanted money. They wanted room and board for me living at the house and I understood that, so a job was imperative. They pushed hard for me to take whatever job I could get. Finally, in early fall, I was working. It was at a sewing factory in a small rural town not too far from the family home.
On this particular day in the fall of 1975, the day started as it had every day since I started working. It was a mindless job that I did not like and that I was not good at. I could not make the quotas. I went to work that morning, spent the day trying to reach their goal, and, in the end, had missed the quota just like every other day. When I left the building I was depressed and my spirits were in the dumps. My husband was in the Mediterranean Sea, my parents wanted money I did not have, I had to live with my younger brother and sisters, and I had a job I hated. This was not the life I had pictured just five months earlier.
Having been in a building all day, I had no idea what the weather was like outside. Once I was free of the building I realized that it had rained and that the sun was out. Then, on my way to the twelve-year-old partially blue clunker I drove, I saw it. My mood immediately brightened and I stood beside that clunker for a good ten minutes watching it carefully. It was large, the colors were bright and vivid, and it arched across the sky with both ends meeting the earth. It was one of the most beautiful, colorful rainbows I had ever seen. Nature’s most beautiful wonder spreading itself across the sky in the brightest colors possible right before me greatly improved my day. After about ten minutes I realized that you could only watch a rainbow so long, so I climbed into the clunker to drive home.
I took my normal route home, keeping a close eye on nature’s bright wonder, driving toward home and the dark rain clouds. Once away from the factory and on the road home, the rainbow had shifted and was straight ahead of me. It was not long before I realized that the rainbow I had watched so long ended on the road I was driving down. I was headed straight for the end of the rainbow! I thought there was no such thing. I was so excited, the depression was gone, the bad mood vanished.
I slowed down and looked behind me. There were three other cars behind me, I could not stop or go too slow. I advanced on the rainbow, slowly, watching it carefully. Then, I was there at the end of the rainbow! I glanced behind me. Those three cars were closer. I could not stop; there was no room on the side of the rural road. I would have had to stop in the road and I knew those other drivers would not like that, so I plunged into the rainbow.
Colors, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet, spilled down onto and up over the hood of the clunker. I watched them come at me with excitement, closer and closer. Then they were gone as they continued over the roof. They became visible again as they passed over the trunk of the clunker and back onto the road behind me. It was like a curtain of colors that could be passed through easily. I watched the car behind me in my rearview mirror, farther behind me now, as the same colors spilled onto his hood and over his car. I continued home in a happier, lighter mood, a smile on my face and joy in my heart. I remember thinking that the next time I find myself in that situation I would stop and touch it, walk through it, and experience it as I had wanted to on that fall day in 1975.
Thirty years later that second day, the second chance has not yet come and I have wished many times that I had stopped despite those people behind me. In fact, many times since then I wish I had experienced the end of the rainbow the way I had wanted to. I wished I had stopped and taken the chance that those other people would have gotten mad, so I could stand there in that rainbow’s bright colors.
I know that there is no pot of gold, or money, or three wishes at the end of the rainbow as the legends say. It was a once in a lifetime experience with one of nature’s most beautiful wonders. I was there once. I was at the end of the rainbow.

Publication Date: 06-20-2010

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