When Rainbows Come

There is a word for what happens when something can no longer hold itself towards the light. It wilts. And once, a very long time ago, Blossom did.

Barely a week old, she lay alone in a dry paddock beneath the unforgiving Australian sun. Her little body was dehydrated, her pink nose badly sunburnt while her pleas for her mumma who would never return carried towards a stranger who did something wonderfully human.

They stopped.

“You can have ’er, she’s no use to me,” came the farmer’s reply. And so, on 26 November 2012, a tiny Hereford calf came to call Edgar’s Mission home sweet home.

We named her Blossom.

Perhaps some names begin as hope and spend a lifetime becoming true. For Blossom did just that.

She grew, although never terribly much and would remain petite for a Hereford. It was as if life had decided to concentrate all that bovine loveliness into a slightly smaller package. And while her body grew, a mean bone never did.

No, not ever.

There were green paddocks and porcine and bovine friendships. Snuffles, Hip Hop Bob, Latefa, Hansel, Clarabelle and Valentine to name but a few. There were those magnificent bug eyes beneath impossibly long white lashes and a gentleness that somehow survived a beginning that had offered her very little of its own.

And she never wilted again.

Not even when cancer claimed her left eye. Blossom’s beautiful white Hereford face came with its own cruel, hidden vulnerability: little protective pigment around her eyes to shield them from harsh ultraviolet rays. And eventually, it was our gentle girl who was asked to carry the consequence.

She recovered from surgery with the quiet resilience that had become so completely hers. Then when that little speck started to grow in the corner of her remaining eye, we knew the cancer had returned.

And this time aggressively.

Even as the cancer grew, it could not diminish our gentle girl, who remained her beautiful, cheery self. And perhaps that was what made the decision so terribly hard. We knew what was coming before she did. And loving her meant ensuring she would never have to know its worst.

And so came her final morning.

Above her, the sky held a rainbow. Around her, a fine rain misted the sanctuary, and we couldn’t help but wonder whether the day was somehow mirroring our hearts.

But we would carry our tears because Blossom had carried enough.

Her last hours were not for our grief. They were for soft voices, familiar hands and the keeping of a promise first made to a frightened little calf nearly fourteen years ago.

And so today she joins old friends who went before her: Latefa, Hansel, Clarabelle and Hip Hop Bob. And once again, we are left with the strange arithmetic of love, where losing someone somehow makes us richer for ever having known them.

Blossom arrived here wilting, then kindness found her. And for almost fourteen years, she turned her beautiful face towards life.

Perhaps that is why rainbows come after rain.

To remind us that someone can be gone from our days and still leave colour in the sky.