Forty-five Minutes to Another World

I enjoyed the small roar of the airplane as it flew over my house and me as I held my Warrior yoga pose on the back porch. Six o'clock in the morning and someone, many someones, were heading to Washington, D.C. on business or to be a tourist. Others will be coming home from one of the same. It was headed to Dulles Airport, east and north of where I stood on my back porch doing deep breathing and enjoying the serene of the unusually cool late June morning.

My dad would take me sometimes to pick up my grandmom from Dulles when she would be coming home from a trip to Miami or California. Usually Miami to check on her apartment building and tenants there. Being from a very rural small town in Virginia, it was exciting to travel close in to the city and to an airport where planes were flying in constantly and people spoke different languages. Another world only forty-five minutes away!

Dad and I would sit sometimes on the retro circle benches that perhaps had a fake tree in the middle. I always felt like someone from my grandparents photos when they were young in the 1950's. Grandmom with her cool blue eyeglasses and sharp suit and Grandad with his thick black frames, a tight ribbed burnt orange turtleneck and sports coat. His hair would have been slicked back.

Then Dad and I would go to the terminal and I'd watch as the planes came in. Having never flown before, and not until I was in college, I was totally mesmerized by those huge flying machines.

Grandmom would come off the plane and into the airport, slowly due to her arthritis but with a smile to see me. We'd funnel through all the people to the down escalator, another thrill, to the baggage claim.

Once all three of us were back in the car, Grandmom's new cadillac always with the smell of a nauseating new car, she'd tell us how her trip was on the way home.

And, as we'd pull into her driveway, unloading her things and telling her we would see her soon, we knew we would as Dad and I would walk home across the field that seperated our houses. I always felt displaced on those days. Such busy people moving around the world just forty-five minutes away. And, here I was, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, home again.

Now I would have to tell my little sister all about it. Who's the traveler now?!

Did you ever have a time where your world felt thinly seperated from another?