The morning came dressed all in gray, with the sun tucked away behind a soft quilt of cloud. The whole world went quiet and cool, and the children pressed their noses to the windowpane and sighed. "There will be no colors today," they said. But they were wrong — for the rain knows a secret that the sunshine never tells.
Tip-tap, tip-tap, down came the rain,
soft on the roof and the windowpane,
it drummed on the leaves and it washed the street,
it pattered a song that was gentle and sweet.
And everywhere the raindrops fell, the world grew brighter, not duller. The dusty leaves turned a deep and glad green. The red of the rooftops glowed like embers. The gray stones shone like polished silver, and every gutter sang a small wet song.
Where the rain had gathered in the road, the puddles became little mirrors, each one holding a piece of the whole wide sky. A child could lean above a puddle and find the clouds beneath her feet, and the rooftops upside down, and her own surprised and smiling face looking back up through the rippling water. The children laughed and stamped and splashed, and the whole bright sky shivered and danced in the puddles at their feet.
For this is the secret the rain knows best: it does not hide the colors away — it wakes them up and makes them shine. Dry things are sleepy and dull and pale, but wet things shimmer and gleam and glow. The rain is not the end of color. The rain is how the colors come alive.
And oh, how the thirsty garden drank! The flowers lifted up their cups and caught the falling silver rain. The roots drank deep beneath the ground. The earth grew dark and rich and glad, and a small green smell of growing things rose up from every bed and row. The snails came out to take a stroll, the worms turned over in the soil, and somewhere a small frog sang for joy at the puddle it had always wished for.
And when at last the rain grew tired and drifted off toward another town, it left behind its finest gift, arched high and shining over all: a rainbow, bright from end to end, every color it had woken strung across the clearing sky.
So come out, come out, when the rain has been,
and see how new the world has grown —
the greens are greener, the blues more blue,
and every gray morning was hiding a rainbow for you.