Literally

I can tell you that, in the last week, I've been to Kansas and back. Just like that. And it feels like it, too. Like just five minutes ago I was walking from the economy parking lot down the sidewalk to the entrance of the tiny and wonderful (though suspiciously lacking in water fountains) Greenville-Spartanburg Airport. A few seconds later I was in descent to Kansas City International Airport, watching the clouds thicken and thin from my window seat. I had been watching the clouds all afternoon, the texture of the upper surface, some tall, some fast, some grey, and the way the sun hit and colored. I had been thinking about the difference of below, how the earth below would be in shadow, under white and lacking sun, while, geographically, I was in the same place yet in an entirely different place. There was sun, blue sky, white only below. I had also been thinking about how wonderful it is that on a plane ride your only job is to gaze at clouds and ponder the earth.

It was in this mindset that I looked for the familiarity of Kansas. As I studied the clouds, we passed through them and, just below, they parted. I fixed on a football stadium below and tried to match the layout with stadiums I have known. First I thought Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, but it wasn't large enough. Then I thought a high school, but it seemed too large. I picked up on the southside building, bright sand, without stands and surveyed its surroundings. Green with more buildings of the same hue. Red roofs on some. Scattered yet close. And then I realized. It was Lawrence.

I searched East for Massachusetts street and found a clustered, lined road. Then North to where the Kansas River should be, flowing East, and found the seemingly still brown mass curving above the town. Just above the Kaw, I followed I-70 from Lawrence to the service station in the middle of lanes to the toll booth farther down yet before Exit 410 and the Speedway. The young UMKC student sitting next to me had been shifting restlessly throughout the short flight from Dallas, occasionally peering forward to see out our window. As we passed over my former home, I pointed down with my left thumb, grinning.

"That was Lawrence," I said, and he nodded, for we had already shared our brief back stories. I smiled and followed the lines of fields and farms, highways and rays of light from the scattered clouds as we closed in on the airport. Kansas only gained this beauty, to me, when I knew I was leaving. And now I was setting down again on this ground that I had left nearly three months before, relieved in the simple curve of the earth and the plotted paths of trees, if only because I missed it and what it still held for me.

Taxiing up to the gate, I texted Jedsen, "I'm here! I'm here! I'm here!" and looked out the window once more to trace the sun down to the ground. A rainbow had formed in the few minutes since we had landed. The right side touched down, centered in my window.

"There's a rainbow," I said to the boy next to me, pointing out again that which I loved.

"There must be a pot of gold down there," he said, shifting his backpack on his shoulders, ready to be on his home ground after three months in Mexico.

I nodded and wanted to walk with him out the terminal to where I hoped to find Jedsen waiting and point to him and say, "There's the man I love."