35,000 Feet

Good Morning Hartsfield Jackson International Airport

I am writing this from the skies. Technically by the time you read it I will have landed, because I am not paying for in-transit internet. 

I am by no means a veteran of the skies, but I like flying more and more every time I do it. 

I love checking in and imagining all the fascinating people the skycap’s get to see. 

I love wandering through the massive concourses and atriums, and think about the people that designed and built them. 

I love standing in line to go through security with hundreds of other people, all just hoping we won’t get pulled for a random pat down or bag search. 

I love that I can traverse forty different back routes through the mountains of North Carolina, but I have to follow signs and take trains to make it from security to my gate.

I love seeing all the different people move around me, and knowing that each and everyone of them has their own unique story going a million different directions, but for this one moment we are united in need get to the top of the escalator, board a plane, make it to Denver. 

I love sitting in the plane and see the sky and the horizon meet in a snowy haze. 

I love watching the clouds underneath me look like homemade whipped cream, fresh from the beater.

I love thinking about the people in the houses, towns, and cities below me going about their lives; taking their kids to school, grocery shopping, cleaning houses, going to work, drinking coffee, meeting new people.

I love seeing the patches of fuzz where we have allowed the earth to remain free, and trees to grow.

I love seeing rivers snake through the earth, connecting country and commercialism.

I love how the slow passing of the landscape paired with the knowledge that we are doing in 2 and half hours, what takes some people two and a half days. 

I love that the turbulence almost comforts me, because of my childhood growing up in old cars with poor suspension. 

I love watching the conservative sexagenarians, engaged in conversation with the thirty year old shaggy redneck.

I love the way I want to get germaphobic if I think about how many people sat in these seats, or breathed this same air, or leaned their head against this same window.

I love that I can’t wrap my mind around how a craft that makes a house looks small, gets itself off the ground and stays in the air, but God made a people who not only understand it, but invent it. 

I love the ever present reminders of how little I know, and how little I control. 

But I think most of all - I love where I am going. Usually to see family, but this time even more so, to meet my niece and see my brother, the father, for the first time. 

Mississippi River

Me on the other side of the Mississippi for the first time!

Hello Denver.

Hello CALLIE!