This morning I sat shaking my head at my computer screen, staring at the wreckage from the earthquake in Japan.  At that moment, Tyler, my four-year-old, came shuffling down the stairs, bleary-eyed, and headed for the window.

“Mama, will you help me open the blinds?” he asked.  “I want to see the rainbow!”

I had already looked outside not much earlier.

The rain was still pelting the roof since the night before.  The sky was the color of smoker’s lungs that hacked all over the once-pristine hills and snow banks.  The forecast predicted steady rainfall right into late afternoon.

I was about to explain this all to Tyler, but he had that boy-on-Christmas-morning look in his eyes.  I paused before the blinds, grabbed hold of the cord and yanked it across like a Band-Aid.  I didn’t turn back around.  Behind me, I knew his face had turned into the kid who just discovered coal in his stocking.

To my surprise, I heard a gasp.  “Look, Mama!” he cried.  “A rainbow!  Do you see it?”

Incredulously, I looked outside at the dirty, melting tundra.  There, across the driveway, amassed the sixth Great Lake, the aftermath of our drainage pipe stuffed with toys from the summer before.  A piece of dog poop rolled off a snow bank and into the water.  Sadly, the only rainbow on this side of the earth was in the boy’s imagination. 

“Where do you see it?” I was about to ask, when the images from Japan returned to me like a flashflood.  For a moment, I wondered if there were rainbows after tsunamis.  And as my boy stood there with that mystified look all over his face, I could come to only one conclusion:  I really, really want to be a kid again.