Life is a Journey

There is always a short period of time during the boarding of a plane in which a game of musical chairs takes place. Families and friends are trying to sit together – and sometimes I am afraid I will be guilted into sitting somewhere far away from Drew so that some lovely woman can nurse her three year old. Yes, I have seen a woman nursing a child who could walk and ask for her breast. That’s a bit off topic. Sort of.

This time neither Drew nor myself was asked to move, but the third person in our row did ask another passenger to switch with him so that he could sit with his wife and child. The passenger that joined Drew and I turned out to be a lovely Pennsylvanian business traveller. When she mentioned the town she visited for her ‘short meeting’, my heart leapt. She works for the company I left back in the states – a place where some of my good friends still work and that I still think of as another home. I don’t know this girl, but she immediately felt to me like a distant relative…

What can I say? You can’t take the south out of the girl.

Someone asked me several days ago what one thing I might wish for this Christmas. I struggled to think of something other than another moment with my mother. I will have the rest of family close to me this year… Maybe now I know how I am meant to spend my one Christmas wish. With all my heart I wish for the precious passenger in 9D to spend this and many more Christmases with her husband – in perfect health. Unfortunately, I understand what it’s like to be taking a plane journey on pins and needles.

2009 has really worn me out, but how I can I complain when I still have so much love in my heart to share? New and old friends have stepped in to fill me up when I exclaim that I am empty. Everything in my body tells me to push forward through the fog that rolled in with the holiday season.

The light isn’t gone; it has been displaced.

Drew and Jen have arrived safely in Tennessee. But you can still catch the word of the day on the website.