For lovers, for dreamers, and me

Nice thing about Fall is that there are a lot of days of mixed weather. Sunshine and rain at the same time is not uncommon as the seasons shift to the shroud of clouds. Once that boom lowers over the Pacific Northwest, it's down for about 7 or 8 months. The benefit of this multiple personality disorder weather is the occasional rainbow.

I was boarding the ferry boat to Seattle around 5 in the afternoon. The sun was shining but a group of clouds was eyeing my freshly ironed hair. Jerks. The clouds started sprinkling and predictably a rainbow formed over the Sound framing the water and the ferry perfectly.

I took a moment and tried hard to drink it in; tried to revel in the sight because it was beautiful and glorious. It may be the last rainbow I get to see this season before the cloud shroud becomes the usual sky.

What was less than beautiful and glorious were the dozens of people taking pictures of that moment.

iPhones & Androids all up facing the sky. There must have been a flood of posts to Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr, Facebook, Imgur, Reddit... Dang, I think I probably could go on.

It was sad, really. What happened to just letting the day happen and being present for that?

My cousin's daughter just got married over the weekend. My mother uploaded a bunch of pictures to her Facebook account and I was grateful for them. So good to see the family. So sad I wasn't able to attend. But it reminded me of my own wedding and the accidental lesson I got in being present.

There are a million tiny things to remember when you're putting on a wedding. I am my parents' only daughter. This would be the only wedding they'd be a part of where they were the parents of the bride. A wedding is a big glitzy production; especially when it is for the only daughter. Ultimately, we were a bunch of amateurs trying to pull off the equivalent of the Academy Awards. The morning of the wedding, which was on the Fourth of July, I realized that I had forgotten to purchase a battery for my camera. Usually this wasn't a big deal. It took lithium batteries which last a long time. I had tons of film; this was 20 years ago, folks. But I had the bad luck of having the battery wear out that very morning.

My mother was furious with me. She had been counting on snapping pictures all day with my camera. The stores around the venues were all closed because of the national holiday. People were deployed to find a battery before the ceremony but all came up empty handed. What's a girl to do?

In the words of the Imagineers at Disney, I simply, "Let it Go!"

What resulted was us being in the moment completely. My parents got to the spend the day really being there and not trying to get the perfect candid shot. My new husband and I were not distracted with trying to document every moment. We had a professional photographer to take those shots anyway. He did a much better job of it than we ever could.

So in our lives now, I've got a phone with over 2,000 images on it. So many of them are pictures of beautiful vistas and breathtaking sunsets. But the thing is, if I'm lucky, there will be another rainbow to relish, another beach to breathe upon, another mountain to stare at in awe.

Instead of taking a picture, I'll strive to take it in -- relish the moment and simply breathe.