Interrupted Rainbow

It’s another beautiful, hot day here in the San Gabriel Valley! But I’m writing about something I saw last night!

The day was spent ridding my guest room closet of an infestation of fabric moths which had taken hold there as I store my old winter coats and fine silks in that closet. Yes, I know, I need to load myself up with moth balls. Most of my woolens are dutifully stored in Japanese cedar tansu drawers, but a few of the long coats were in this closet.

Last year I had a pantry moth infestation and it took me a long time by myself to throw out a lot of food, mostly flours and meal. I had too many in the closet, many needed to go; I experiment a lot with things foreign to me just because I like learning new things. And so a collection of things I didn’t like or didn’t use completely comes into being. Anyway, I learned that you freeze flours - even new bags from the store - for 48 hours to kill larvae (larvae can get into even the flour on the store shelves!) My freezer was quite full; and now when I bring something home from the store it goes in the freezer first for a couple of days. I haven’t had any more problems with pantry moths (although I have had a problem finding things easily in my freezer!)

Well, yesterday my friend came to help me. My back was still a little out and so carrying heavy long coats down the stairway wasn’t ideal for me; but i wanted the little buggers out! It was a nasty job checking everything, and finding the larvae hiding in the folds. I had put phernome induced clothes moth traps in the closet for a few days so we didn’t have to deal with them flying around while we got rid of the larvae. My friend put the valuable infested coats and many other things in garbage bags to take to her freezer where they will be put for 48 hours and then brought back. My son found the strategy of freezing my clothes unusual, but the clothes moths are not so different from the pantry moths it seems. Freezing will kill the larvae and then I can handle the garments more easily; not all of them can be washed.

We took a dinner at a local Chinese restaurant I like and on the way back to her big black truck filled with garbage bags, I saw an amazing and inexplicable sight: something in the sky, behind the cloud, it was a glowing orangish, yellow, white presence which looked something like a rainbow but didn’t continue across the sky. I was so transfixed by this sight I turned off the road to find a place to look at it. And when I found that place, I also found another similar phenomenon on the other side of the sun. We kept looking for that part of a rainbow that connected both sides, but there was none. And so I doubted that it was a rainbow. But I had no other explanation or name for this sight, so I decided to call it an interrupted rainbow, until the mystery was solved.