Flying home like color photos aging.

The plane jolts, and I am jarred back into the dimension of life called reality. I realize my eyes have been fixated on the snow covered plains.Cruising altitutde of 11000 meters, skirting the tails of a major snow storm about to sweep my home tomorrow evening. The ground looks like the old pictures from the photo albums my mother keeps. The color photos aging to where there is white, grey, the red is more black, like dried blood, blue and green fade and become the same color.

Home, that is where I am going.

At times it crosses my mind what the sensation of engine failure would be. That sudden deceleration, the falling pit in my stomach as the earth pulls back what belongs to it. What would my last thoughts be? would it be a series of regrets, wondering all the things that I have left undone? Who will take care of my possessions, fewer in number but spread out? Would my thoughts turn to my family, my parents, my childhood? Would they turn to sara, would I be in the car kissing her goodbye one last time? Would I go past, or future? Perhaps I would go nowhere, and face the present moment.

I am passing over the mississippi river as I type. I have never realized how large the flood basin is for that river, with the snow on the ground, the contours are much easier to see. There are wind mills as well, sporadically spread over the hillsides. They are whiter than the snow, seemingly frozen in place from so far away.

Geologists warn that a major earthquake is due in this area sometime soon. They issue it in earnest, as if it would cause some salvation to those who heed it. It's almost impossible to believe that such a thing would happen during our lifetime, or our passing through.

Death is the easiest thing to prepare for, simply because once it happens, there is no affecting its outcome, what is done is done. Or maybe it is that my view of life after death is skewed, maybe its much like this life all over again.To fall out of the sky would be simple, it would happen and nothing could stop it. But landing, and going on with life, going home, seeing family and friends, going back west, making future plans, no, without simplicity those things are carried out. they are interrupted at once by a trivial event. And again a plan must be made before death comes to call us from the waiting room.

The sun sets as we race to meet it coming the other way. I sleep intermittently trying to make up from the last two nights of broken slumber