To and From the Bus Stop, and Fogbows.

When you live in the county, apparently, the school bus generally just picks the kids up right outside of their own houses! But ... since we live on a dead-end street (skinny enough that it would require an eighty-point turn for any bus to turn back around), we walk down to the end of the street, cross Mendon Road, and wait in Aunt Sarah's driveway. 

On our way we gather a little troop of people. Admittedly my four elementary kids (plus Starling bundled in her stroller) make up most of the troop, but our next-door neighbor (Kelli) and her three kids walk out as we come by, and then, a little further down, their grandma (Becky) comes out (with their little cousin who she watches in the morning). And we all continue on--we three women and nine kids--to the bus stop. We call to the kids running ahead not to cross the road without us (cars go so fast on that road!), and we call to everyone to move to the side when the bishop's wife comes along our road on her way to helping with reading groups at the school. We tell the kids to quit kicking Sarah and Garth's gravel into the canal as we wait, and I prep Hansie to be ready to run to the bus when it arrives: "Just hug me right now so you're ready to get on the bus when it comes, and you just need one hug and kiss on the head--you don't need to keep running back for more while the bus driver waits." (He still usually runs back for one last hug.) 

And then we walk back--chatting about things like how soon Kelli will be able to tell if her dog is pregnant, and how on earth her hip could be giving her problems when she had surgery on it just this May, and we talk about my house still not selling, and about when Becky and Dick will bring their cows down from where they've been grazing in Morgan, and about the time Dick hit a construction sign (in the middle of the road in the fog) and thought it was a person (he was searching in terror in the fog for some time for the "person" he'd hit before finding the broken sign and realizing what had happened), or the time someone else hit one of their escaped pigs and it was scream-squealing so loudly that he thought it was a person. (Becky had to practically smack him to get him to snap out of his horrified repetition of "I hit a child! I hit a child!". "It was a PIG!" she kept telling him--as she motioned to Dick to find some way to put it out of its misery and stop its screaming. "It was not a child! It was just a PIG!")

(Also, a crazy thing: here we are, with only these few houses on our street, and my kids so happy to have three great friends right next door. Having friends next door when houses are so spread out to begin with seemed impossible luck. But now we've discovered that these friends placed so conveniently ... are actually my kids third cousins! When we spoke in church and Mike mentioned his Hansen relatives, Kelli made the connection. Abraham Hansen [who we named our Abe after] was not only Mike's second-great grandpa, but hers as well! And thus third-great-grandpa to all of our kids! Such a small world!)

(Another thing about the roads here--I feel obligated to wave to every car that ever passes by; especially when I'm out running. I don't recall ever paying attention to passing cars before, but now, chances are pretty high that any car driving past me is in my ward, and, even if they aren't, they have most likely just moved over into the other lane to make sure not to hit me on our skinny roads and so deserve a wave of acknowledgment. I like the feeling of community that the small business of everyone waving and nodding to each other as they drive by creates.)

But back to walking to and from the bus stop in the mornings. Becky and Kelli each depart to their respective houses first on our way back, so there is always a strip of just empty road that Starling and I walk in quiet. The other morning as we walked this stretch, I pulled out my phone and took a photo or two of the fog.

(Well, this first picture was actually looking north from our house before leaving in the morning.)

 But I took this from the view to my right as I walked home.

And then I took this of the view to my left:

And noticed that a streak of white seemed to be forming in the dissipating fog. And then, there wasn't just a streak, but a full rainbow composed completely of fog!

I texted it to my sisters with a questioning, "Fog rainbow? Halloweeny ghost rainbow??" 

I looked them up later and they are a recognized phenomenon--though far less common that an actual rainbow. (The smaller water droplets of fog mean that the color is very weak--if discernable at all.) They are called fogbows, ghost rainbows (just as I'd joked to my sisters!), white rainbows, cloud bows, and, if you are a mariner, sea dogs (why?). 

This is the first one I've ever seen, and it was only there for a few short minutes, so I'm grateful I happened to be out just then and now feel like I must see them again! (And assign some sort of superstitious sign to them--as surely those mariners calling them sea dogs must do.)