Dark clouds and it rained confetti

The day is cold,  and dark, and dreary/ It rains and the wind is never weary…

As in Longfellow’s verse, sudden drizzle and an overcast sky couldn’t dampen the spirits of thousands who joined this year’s Sinulog procession.

The mid-afternoon had gotten so dim that photographers had to set their cameras at low shutter speeds, causing the flow of people on the foreground in one of the pictures here to look like a hazy stream of colors and the caroza, carrying the image of the Madonna and the Holy Child, a flower-bedecked raft.

That joyful stream flowed past USC which added to the street’s riot of colors with confetti, buntings, streamers, and flowers on the façade of the freshly-painted Arthur Dingman Building.

At the first hint of downpour, colorful umbrellas bloomed as though to challenge the dark gray clouds that threaten to hide the spectacle from the heavens. How the angels must have seen it is anyone’s guess, but the view from the ground is already a moving epiphany.

Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;/ Behind the clouds is the sun still shining…