Sylvia's Journal

We went flying, finally. It was a plan that hatched in my BU class in July where Nuha was a student. When she first told me she wanted to jump out of a plane, I told her that when I am up in the air I keep the door tightly shut and she would not be able to jump, but that I’d take her up. Nuha was not fazed by the fact that I had crashed a plane 16 months ago.

I picked her up at the Manchester train station in the early afternoon, just when the cloud cover began to thin out. We walked back to our house, admiring the trees, blazing in their oranges, yellows and greens along the way. It is nice to experience the New England fall with someone who comes from the desert. Our neighbors have an apple orchard that borders our driveway. I took Nuha there to pick an apple, straight from the tree, and then we ate it, another miracle.

At Beverly Airport I showed her my own damaged plane, waiting forlornly in a corner of the airport for the adjusters’ reports to come in. We got to fly in 3152K, one of the newer airplanes, which is much less noisy than mine. We first flew to Manchester and circled above the house where Axel was trying to attract our attention with a mirror. Everything looks so much different from above. Nuha had asked me why I wanted to go up and fly each week. I told her to wait and see and that she would understand once we were up in the sky; and she did. After we landed she did not need to ask the question again.

We flew over Plum Island and admired the pattern of the Ipswich wetlands with its meandering creeks that drain the land at low tide. We circled over the Topsfield Fair, still crowded on its last day, and then back via Essex to Beverly for a perfect landing.

Back home the clouds had cleared entirely and we had tea and a late lunch on the beach. We picked more apples and Nuha took the camera trying to capture all the amazing vistas and colors, to take back home with her when she leaves for Saudi Arabia in January.

We cooked a Bangla dinner together and Nuha got to cut the chard straight out of the garden and prepare the homegrown potatoes. It was a delightful dinner preparation for me as everything was new and out-of-the-ordinary, nothing taken for granted (“what, you are getting the lettuce for my sandwich from the garden? Can I come?”).

After dinner I drove Nuha back to Cambridge and we talked about how unsettling it can be to find yourself in a current that takes you away from the familiar lands into a vast body of water with no land in sight for a long time to come. I had bought the book The Peabody Sisters for Nuha some time ago, a challenge and a half to read with its 500 or so pages. But I thought it would interest her to read the story of a woman who, at exactly her age, 100 years ago and growing up in a place that has some characteristics of Nuha’s current hometown, managed nevertheless to put her stamp on a field that is close to Nuha’s heart, education, especially for girls.