For our 20th wedding anniversary dinner on Saturday night, I put on a sequined top and the rhinestone earrings I bought in a Chicago vintage shop. “Please note that the temperature on the rooftop,” the restaurant wrote, “can be much cooler than at street level,” so we pulled out the wool blankets from storage and my husband threw them on the backseat. 

Just a few days before, we had a full moon. My yoga leader told me that this is a special time when innocence and wisdom are in perfect balance, when old wounds are brought up from the deep, beauty and abundance are awakened, and a new understanding can be forged.

When we walked onto the top of the 32-story high-rise in downtown Arlington, we could see the Washington Monument lit up like a sword. The dome of the Capitol glowed softly like a basilica in Rome. But the moon was the brightest of all. It lit up my husband’s sweet face, his flute of Prosecco sparkling like alfalfa honey, and the ball of buffalo mozzarella we ordered to start, so creamy it tasted like it had been airlifted from Sorrento.

The first time I did a Zoom meeting with other parents at the college where our daughter just started, we all went around the screen and introduced ourselves. When it came to the man with the long beard, he said he was from the part of Kentucky that is famous for moonbows, the kind of rainbow you can see when the moon shines on Cumberland Falls and the water droplets reflect all the colors.

This summer our youngest did a yoga camp on Zoom in her room by herself. She and 5 other little girls wrote in journals and colored mandalas and skipped rope with cords we picked up from the yoga studio in a goody bag.

One day she wrote a guided meditation, dedicated to me:  

Imagine, you are at the beach, and then, appears a rainbow, and then a bird swoops down and is waiting for you to get on it. So then, you walk to the bird, and say, “May you please take me up to that rainbow?” And the bird replies, “Yes I may.” And the bird takes you up to the rainbow and drops you on the rainbow and you feel how soft it is.

My husband and I shared a blanket in the black night, sitting side by side on cushioned chairs. “Is there a rainbow around the moon?” my husband asked in Italian as he looked up at the sky. I didn’t see it, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. I still remember the summer in Puglia, swimming off the rocky Ionian coast, when he swam into the coldest part of a famed grotto, and a blue light made a halo around him and followed him as he swam away.

“Forse sono i miei occhiali,” Maybe it’s my glasses, he said, still looking up at the moon. “Si erano appannati.” They were steamed up, he said about his breath and the mask and his lenses. The tiny droplets of water making rainbows.

I remember one evening this summer when the air smelled of thunderclouds and wet sidewalks. Then all of a sudden the world was bathed in a peach light. Trees looked like black felt cut-outs against the white sky. The storm had lumbered away, spilling behind it a bucket of white soapy water that was being tinted with watercolors — yellow, peach, pink. When the sky turned to fuchsia and lavender, I began to understand I had been under a cloud rainbow.

When we were waiting for the first course, I went to the railing and looked over the city, scanning the blurry black and the dripping light, thinking how the president is on this same patch of land too. Reading about him in the paper and seeing him on the screen, I forget his orbit is only 5 miles away from my everyday life. Occasional red and blue flashing lights around the city scene remind me that he was in the hospital, and I wonder if I can see Walter Reed from here. 

When you’re up this high, you feel closer to everything. I had wished this disease on him, thinking it was the only way out of this misery. But now that it’s happened, I don’t feel that way. Nothing can be solved when you become blackened and hard.

Everything looks so small — the White House, Memorial Bridge, even the Potomac, a line of glue in a diorama. Uncaught from my cage, released from my circle in the dirt, I have become a bird in the sky.

You have to go through the night to get to the moonbow. The storm must be borne to see a rainbow. Water is so clear that light shines through; may I become like water too.