The Rainbow

I've been taking the bus home every day across Lake Washington, along the curvilinear form of the Evergreen Point Bridge. It floats on pontoons for most of its span, and you spend most of the ride seeming to skim the surface, gray water meeting gray skies.

The sun barely peeks out from the light rain, and suddenly a rainbow is refracted over Laurelhurst. You see the hilly neighborhood through it, and the paint on each house is slightly modified by some point on the natural spectrum.

It is in these fleeting occasions, when the shape of the city is suddenly, briefly transformed, that you come to look on a place as you never perceived it before. Through the veil, something you see every day explodes with new life. Suddenly, minute details become obvious-- an A-frame on a hillside, a row of poplar trees-- and every time you pass by them now, you notice them. The experience of a place becomes permanently altered by a single moment. The rainbow isn't just an optical effect. It is a catalyst of perceptive transformation.

When I see somewhere for the first time, I automatically transfix it my mind as the "natural" appearance of a place. It is my first clear vision of what that place is. Maybe it will change gradually and imperceptibly. Maybe it will change overnight, suddenly destroyed. But either way, when we notice it again, after an absence, we are staring at the remnants of what was there before. Maybe it was someplace you cherished-- it could have been the spot where you had your first kiss, the backyard where you lost your first tooth. When we look back on a place, it is all caught up in nostalgia and sentiment.

If we see that place over and over again, our picture of it conforms to its new reality. That old image is contorted until it is nothing but a Vaseline-smeared trace of what it once was. When we recall it, we see flickers of light, but it ultimately recedes back into darkness.

My old preschool was torn down sometime in the past several years, and the last time I was back in my ville natale, I walked down the gravel alley that ran behind the lot where it once stood. For the first time in 20 years, I saw a power line along the alley disappear behind a huge oak tree. When I last saw it, I was standing in a pea gravel yard in a T-shirt, and shorts, staring up at the adult world, at the dusty Impalas and Caprice Classics the teachers drove, their grilles at eye level. The shade of the oak tree marked the end of the known world. Beyond, was a sun-dappled yard I would never set foot in.

Some day, I'd like to go to all the places I've ever inhabited, seeing what's changed, what's remained static. Having examined the scope of my life through the places I've lived, I can say I saw the timeline of my life made manifest in space. I can say who I was and who I am. When I come back to the place where I live now, I will see that a crack in the paint has appeared, and a cobwebbed bookshelf has been cleaned, new carpeting put down. But the light that hits the kitchen on wintry Sunday mornings will remain.