There! I have given this blogpost a title to which it will never live up.
Detroit airport is far from the dumpy, slow and grey place it was when I last passed through in 2001. Everything is shiny and moves faster than I remember, and it seems as if ours is the only flight that arrived at the time it did, whereas I know that's peak arrival time.
The delay in our arrival means we are on the road at the same time as Friday flexitime commuters. We take a detour--a scenic detour--to escape traffic jams and I have the chance to remember things I had forgotten.
Like this is the time when everything is harvested. Talk stalks of corn lined the roads we drove on from Willard Airport to Philo, and I could see their silhouette as we drove. I had never lived near farmland before and the cycle of seasons in Indian schools is summer, monsoon and cool weather. I had never read the seasons in the land. Till Illinois.
Larry Kanfer's Prairiescapes had been placed on my bed to entertain me. It showed me how to see these flat lands, so easily dismissed by those with a taste for the dramatic, as beautiful and subtly spectacular.
I had forgotten how green everything is. And that Michigan is hilly. I had forgotten how quiet these towns are, and how orderly.
I hard forgotten how chatty everyone is, and how easy it is for introverts to be chatty when it is not necessary to hold up one's guard against an endless barrage of personal questions. And advice.
I had forgotten that I have not once come back to the place that was home--these prairie states--in a time when everything else was changing. Fifteen years. And then this drive home on country roads.
The song asks "country roads" to take the singer to the place where he belongs. I don't belong here. That is the reason I left--to do the work that I wanted in the place to which I belong and which belongs to me without doubt. But I left behind friendships and took back with me a heart full of memories of kindness and warmth, and a memory of myself that sometimes gets lost somewhere on the cluttered desk of my responsibilities.
In order to find your way, sometimes you have to go away and sometimes you have to come home. I have gone away and come home. In these large open spaces, live friends with large, open hearts, and I will find myself and my way, once again.
I can smell the greenery everywhere, and I remember that I like that smell.
It's so good to be here... to be home!
Detroit airport is far from the dumpy, slow and grey place it was when I last passed through in 2001. Everything is shiny and moves faster than I remember, and it seems as if ours is the only flight that arrived at the time it did, whereas I know that's peak arrival time.
The delay in our arrival means we are on the road at the same time as Friday flexitime commuters. We take a detour--a scenic detour--to escape traffic jams and I have the chance to remember things I had forgotten.
Like this is the time when everything is harvested. Talk stalks of corn lined the roads we drove on from Willard Airport to Philo, and I could see their silhouette as we drove. I had never lived near farmland before and the cycle of seasons in Indian schools is summer, monsoon and cool weather. I had never read the seasons in the land. Till Illinois.
Larry Kanfer's Prairiescapes had been placed on my bed to entertain me. It showed me how to see these flat lands, so easily dismissed by those with a taste for the dramatic, as beautiful and subtly spectacular.I had forgotten how green everything is. And that Michigan is hilly. I had forgotten how quiet these towns are, and how orderly.
I hard forgotten how chatty everyone is, and how easy it is for introverts to be chatty when it is not necessary to hold up one's guard against an endless barrage of personal questions. And advice.
I had forgotten that I have not once come back to the place that was home--these prairie states--in a time when everything else was changing. Fifteen years. And then this drive home on country roads.
In order to find your way, sometimes you have to go away and sometimes you have to come home. I have gone away and come home. In these large open spaces, live friends with large, open hearts, and I will find myself and my way, once again.
I can smell the greenery everywhere, and I remember that I like that smell.
It's so good to be here... to be home!
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