Holiday (Verbal) Snapshots

11/23/2010

I endured an annoying 3 hr delay for what should have been an easy-peasy direct flight from Pittsburgh to Charlotte. We took off from PGH after we were originally slated to arrive at CLT. Some things I noticed:

-A solitary girl--mid-twenties?--keeping her small, chic airport store tidy while Christmas music plays overhead. I am struck by the contrast between the sacred-filial nature of the music and the corporate materialism and isolation of the setting.

-The plane breaks over the clouds, a vast white-gray cotton ball expanse lit from below with patches of orange suburban light. The moon shines high, small and bright above the cloudscape and Orion reaches for it in an eternal, sisyphean freeze-frame.

-The ground far below is black and inscrutable. The Gods-eye view shows thousands of light-points, intersecting curving roads and silhouetted tree tops--all that man has wrought upon the darkened geography. Each light represents--one person? One family? Five families? I think about how God must see us bustling about on this rock, taking note of each of our lives. I'm wondering--what do I amount to in this hill of beans? What will I amount to? Who will notice?

11/24/2010

I'm glad to be home with mom and sister. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. We spend a pleasant drive together from Charlotte to Jacksonville. Katie (sister) and I sing songs together, though I hold off on the Disney princess ballads she wants me to back her up on.

11/25/2010

A morning walk in the dark—-my first time up before dawn on Thanksgiving in my living memory.

You know you have some form of homesickness when the pungent salt-sulphur aroma of the intracoastal marshes makes you feel like you’ve returned. My uncle's neighborhood is all tall, twisted, moss-covered oaks like the ones around the house and neighborhood I grew up in. I recognize fauna sounds I never realized were unique to home. Chirps and twitters in the branches above; I heard them a long time ago.

It's still dark. The moon, a bright waning gibbous, hangs high and small above—the sky is clear but the ground is wet and water drips from the trees. A pre-dawn mist hangs low and close, and white light from the sparsely placed street lamps pokes Spielbergian rays through leaf-lattices and I wonder can I go anywhere without something reminding me of a movie.