It was just after dinner on a gloomy day in New Hampshire when my dad and I decided to go fishing out in our boat on the lake behind our log cabin. We got all of our gear ready and trotted our way down the steep, muddy, and rocky hill to get to the lake. The dock pegged into the brown muckiness of the water is where our big, shiny boat with glossy wooden oars on either side floats just above the squishy lake bottom. Our poles jingled with every step we took. I usually take my phone everywhere, but what if for some reason it fell in the water? I couldn’t risk it. Besides, in an area at least twenty minutes away from any cell phone service, I wouldn’t need it anyway.

It was a slow start on our trip. After about a half hour, the water started to calm down until it had an almost mirror-like reflection. Holding our poles, we watched the baby blues and teals of the sky slowly fade into the sunset. We rowed to one side of the lake where the line of the deep woods is, the best place to fish. From here, you could overlook the whole lake. The green trees surround you like walls, the water sends the tiniest ripples out from the one point where a fish jumps for food, and the only view you get of the sky feels like all of it. It’s like I was floating in my own personal snow globe.

As the beautiful sunset crept into view, so did some dark rain clouds. As scary as they looked, they only brought a small mist over the lake. For some reason, when I looked up, the rain clouds traveled way faster than any regular ones. As they kept moving along over the mountains, I could see the cloudy, grey mist coming off from the clouds. It was kind of amazing to see a whole rain cloud pass over just above our heads.

The view that I was seeing was like I was inside of a painting worth millions of dollars. The sunset of dandelion yellows, subtle oranges, cotton candy swirls of pink and blue, and violet purples hung over the whole left side of the sky. On the right hand side, the almost full moon shone brightly against the fading, navy blue night sky behind it. And in the middle, going right across the sky almost as if connecting the two times of the day: a carefully curved rainbow. That rainbow was the only fully curved one I’ve ever seen. Neither I nor my dad brought our phones that night so we couldn’t get an image of this once in a life time scene, but I’ll just say that I did not need to take a picture to remember something that beautiful. While this was going on, my dad rowed us back to the dock as fast as he could. When we got there, I jumped out, ran all the way up the steep hill to my cabin to get my phone and then ran back down. Panting, I jumped on the dock and took out my camera to be nothing but disappointed. The sky wasn’t nearly as beautiful as it was, but pieces of the carefully depicted image that I had in my brain at the time was still kind of there. I snapped a photo of it and looked. It wasn’t as good as when it was actually happening, but still pretty. This scene came and went all within a span of maybe ten minutes. Just ten minutes can change the way you look at the world.  Even though I don’t have a picture now, I have one that I can think of in my head. And I still know exactly what it looked like.