The close to my cross-country flight from New York back to Seattle was lovely. After chasing the sun westward for hours over a smooth, milky atmosphere, it was finally clearly in the lead as the sky grew a deeper shade of blue, and the low angle of its rays from the horizon gleamed brightly on the front of the plane's wing and jet casing to the right out my window.
Though occasionally the plane of white below would thin to reveal a geometric, waffled landscape of mid-western hedgerows dusted with drifts of snow along their bases below, it wasn't until the 737 began its descent that the scene outside became anything more than a simple abstraction of a field of white below, blue beyond, and a sharp slice of metal piercing between (on the upturned tip of the wing, the airline's web address, for immediate reminding of how to arrange yourself such a wonderful experience again- regardless of the fact you won't be online soon, given you're stuck inside the plane). As we got lower, approaching western Washington, the pale of the atmosphere became richly defined: more and more so as we sunk toward it. It was like a children's cartoon, or a television advertisement for whipped yogurt or cream cheese. The blue of the sky and clouds, with the soft, peachy hues of the beginning of sunset, reminded me of a powder room decorated around nineteen-ninety, with colors you'd see in large floral patterns, or beach-themed schemes involving waves and the interior of a clamshell. Oddly, and astoundingly to me, it truly, and sadly unoriginal-soundingly resembled cotton candy. In both colors, pink and blue, the soft mounds were uncannily like the carnival snack, right down to the wispy, transparent tufts pulled gingerly first from the edges.
As the plane lowered to their level and grazed the stratosphere, we sliced through the clouds. As experienced and jaded a traveler as I am normally and tend to behave as, there was a bit of thrill in this experience. I watched the precipitation stick to the curve of the rim on the jet casing, and then streak back over the riveted sheet metal as we re-emerged from a cloud. At some points the voluminous cumulus clouds would stretch out into stratus and cirrus form, resembling unrolled batting waiting to become a quilt, or cotton pulled from a bottle of aspirin.
The light was changing and soon the sun was rocket-pop red, burning itself down into the horizon at a pace noticeable to the naked eye. A minute or so later we emerged beneath the clouds, and there it lay before me- a dusky, sleepy, Pacific Northwest. And something surprising occurred. Immediately after coming through the clouds, I saw the northern edge of what I guessed to be Lake Washington, and was able to identify absolutely everything as we flew over. Juanita beach at the top, Third Place Books nearby, Lake City Way reaching southwest, the Roosevelt Reservoir, North 65th Street, I-5, Greenlake, Woodland Park with floodlit baseball fields, Phinney Ridge, Aurora bridge and Ballard's fishing boats, Lake Union with Queen Anne hill behind, even my apartment building on its south slope thanks to the giant white retirement home two blocks downhill. Flying beyond the Space Needle, downtown, the Port of Seattle's red cranes and the Duwamish River, I truly realized something I'd been coming to for a while: after eight years here, I know this place entirely. It is my place; beautiful, comfortable, home; and full of people, customs, and places I understand.
