After a blazing hot day yesterday in Philadelphia, we had a tornado alert and high winds, then a downpour so hard that the roofs of the houses, broiling from the earlier sunlight, began to steam. Then, because the clouds were moving so fast, the rain stopped, and there was a fantastical yellow glow over everything, due to the late sun shining from beneath the thunderclouds and the droplets hanging in the air. 

The strange wet light shone into my cool, dry house from every window.

With the tempest, my block had been transported, street and all, to another planet, with a different sun, and with a different atmosphere, soaked with water. 

My phone lit up. It was my neighbor. “Have you been outside? Go outside,” he said, and I went out onto my front step. He crossed the street and joined me. We stood looking up.

A rainbow arched across the sky, like a frame for the raggedy little brick row-houses across from us. There was another rainbow above it, like an echo. 

We stood and stared, a tall man with a bad back and a short old woman with bad knees, and we marveled. We stayed there until the ordinary world returned.