Monday night, Greensboro was pelted with winds up to 60 m.p.h. Many branches and trees were knocked down. The rain average was about half an inch. Tuesday morning, it rained again. We went to Wal-Mart on North Battleground Avenue to get coffee and as we were entering the store, a woman told us to turn around and look, if we wanted to see a rainbow.

While we weren’t in a glamorous, photogenic place (one of the lakes would have been nice), we were reminded that beauty is all around us. Rainbows symbolize hope and the promise of better times. They are optical illusions that depend on the viewer’s position and the angle of the sun, the horizon line, and the rain. Well, we might not have been at a park or lake, but we were in precisely the right place to share a rainbow sighting with a delightful stranger who was also out shopping at 8:00 am in the morning.