Even though I landed in Missoula a good hour and a half late, I didn't mind, cuz I felt like I’d already been home for hours.Eager to get started, I made it to the Sacramento Airport 3 hours before my scheduled flight. Once my bags were checked, and my toiletries confiscated, I headed straight for the Alaska Terminal.
I guess in January, nobody’s heading north unless they live here. No California tourists were waiting for the flight to Winter.
The first thing I noticed was a yellow Carhartt lying over the back of a chair. Then I saw a pair of mukluks on a tall, bearded Nordic god. And then there were the two laptops in the corner, lying open, unattended in empty chairs, their users probably sitting in the bar watching the game.
No one was wearing a suit. But there were heavy jackets and winter coats everywhere, piled 3-high on seats, draped over carryons, and tucked under barstools. There was an easy, neighborly atmosphere. Everybody was expecting snow. Some were wondering if their connecting flights from Seattle were going to be cancelled. Certainly, most would be delayed.
Folks were heading home to places like Anchorage, Sitka, Juneau, Vancouver BC, Kamloops, Boise, and Missoula. It was as though I’d already left California. These were my people. This was my neighborhood, my culture. Nobody here was talking about whose baby Angelina Jolie was adopting, or Schwarzenegger’s steroid-weakened bones. The conversations floating and mixing here were about snow, keeping dry, and the unfortunate possibility of missing a day of work.
[if anyone can tell me the name of the image i've parodied, i'd be grateful. i wanted to give attribution, but cannot for the life of me remember the name of the work, let alone its creator....shattered spheres?...i googled that but got zip, and that's what i was thinking the name was.]
I've found the image. It's called, L'atmosphère: météorologie populaire by Camille Flammarion (1888),
and I've posted a little something about it, here.
9 comments:
I feel as though I got to experience your flight with you. It's easy read how happy you are to be home. I know you'll be much happier now.
Nice illo. Hey is that you winking at me from the window? ;)
S
Flying is not my favorite thing to do, but I am always happen when it is relatively uneventful. Glad that yours was.
i enjoyed reading your post.
best regards
Cat I am so very glad you are back where you belong.
Yours could be a parody of my haiku of yesterday!?:) Both seem to be about windows!:)
A new Noah’s ark –
the bird feeder in the tree
looks like a window
I know it’s hard times. But, then, there’s poetry in it. I see this as (almost) intentional suffering here and now (entering winter now): the notion of life as a conflict between good and bad / light and darkness etc. (words written in the window frame) is reduced to bare essentials, transformed into a window and left behind; the flight of imagination begins; life is seen for what it really is. Glad you’re back home.
Welcome 'home' -- even those of us on the Pacific Northwest coast are getting a *real* winter for once.
Welcome home!
Loved reading about your trip... reminds me of coming home from Wyoming after visiting my sister there... the tiny airport was almost deserted, and security was nowhere to be seen. Speaking as a native Californian though, I beg to differ from those stereotyped hollywierd types who spout gosspisms from the newsrags on the store racks. Some of us live where the wild things are.
Hoping your homecoming is wonderful, easy, comforting, and that you get settled in soon.
hello all: I'm sure glad to be here. I am not hooked up with an ISP, yet, and Kinko's costs 20¢ an hour, so I am trying to fit time in at the library...but there's a waiting list. So I will be working in my room, and then moving things to disc...then uploading them here.
tsduff: I didn't mean to disparage Californians, LOL. It just seemed like the local news spent an inordinate amount of time on celebrities!
violet: The painting I'm talking about is one where a robed figure has broken a sphere and is looking "outside" of that sphere. I think it's a painting much older than we are. He's in a red robe, and his world has a tree and some buildings in the background. There is a crescent moon with a face and a sun with a face...and outside the sphere he has broken/torn...there are cogwheels, I think.
borut: it will be hard going for quite a few months...maybe a year, but it's worth it to be here where winter lives. it's funny. i feel like writing a novel! hehehe. i think i'd better stick to the haiku and little poems.
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