–Puzzle Pieces, May 29th, 2007, photo © 2007 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.
Arrived safely into Baltimore after an hour delay in the flight. I had the very last window seat on the left side of a plane filled with chatty middle school kids, a toddler, and a screaming baby one aisle over. I’m not complaining. I was happy to catch the flight. I practiced just sitting.
My mother and brother were there to meet me at the gate with open arms. They were a sight for sore eyes. After the hour and a half drive north, I walked back into the Pennsylvania home where I spent my teenage years, and the first thing I said was, “Smells like home!”
“Smells like home,” Mom repeated and kind of smiled as she hugged me and went through the daily mail. I’m tired tonight. Not much umphhh left. I bet you’ll find typos and rambling sentences in this post. But I wanted to get the aerials on the page.
What I realized is that the area around Baltimore is even more lush and green than Minnesota. You don’t get the patchwork quilt of fallow fields or the splat of glacial sky puddles. But you do get jigsaw forests and sea inlets, briny make up of a showdown between aquamarine salt and bluesy freshwater.
-Bridge, May 29th, 2007, photo © 2007 by QuoinMonkey.
All rights reserved.
And I think that’s the beginning of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, though I don’t know for sure. I’ve driven it a few times on the way to Ocean City, Maryland with my family. But from the air, and with my spatial ineptitude, I could be staring at a foot trail through the Rockies, and I might not know it. I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong. I wish I had shot this last one a few hundred feet forward. That’s when the bridge opened up to the huge expansiveness that it really is.
Alas, it’s time for bed. I’m downloading on dial-up and all my electronic gizmos, cords, and gadgets are spread out on the bed. It takes an arsenal to travel and capture the subtle nuances of the environment. Changes from day to day.
Already I’ve talked to my step-dad and we might make a journey to Tennessee to see the places where I spent some of my younger years. He said most of the houses are still standing. My brother said he’d fire up his GPSr so Mom and I might be able to do some geocaching in Georgia and South Carolina. Mom and I talked about Savannah over dinner at Rock-It Pizza & Subs down the way. And I tried to track down the address of my 8th grade English teacher, Mrs. Juarez.
Let the sleuthing begin. So far, so good. I’ve called many places home. But of all of them, this place smells the most like what I remember as home. The house noises are starting to resonate. My mother has lived here over 40 years. A long time. And at the same time, only the blink of an eye.
Wednesday, May 30th, 2007
– related to posts, View From The Sky and Arriving Albuquerque From Seat 21A
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