Sylvia's Journal

I am flying about 35000 feet over millions of acres of Maine/Canadian woods, along an aviation highway. Every few minutes a plane races by my window in the opposite direction. I am glad to know that planes in opposite direction have to hold different altitudes (odd and even thousands of feet) so I don’t need to worry about us flying straight into each other. It stays light on the left side of the plane for most of the journey; in the north the sun never sets in this time of the year. On my side it gets pitch dark.

Now and then we dive into a massive cumulus cloud and I think of the Air France plane from Brazil that disappeared into one full of thunder, lighting and turbulent air never to come out whole. Life is fragile and everything can be changed in a matter of minutes.

Or a matter of months. Susan died this morning. She slipped out at 5:24 AM which is just about the time that I opened my eyes to a new day. All day I walked around with her in my head wondering how it is possible that someone so full of life can be dead in a matter of months. I look down on the endless Maine woods, wondering where Susan is now, while I listen to Feist. Suddenly, as if to answer my question, the combination of the low sun, white clouds and the reflection of the plane produced an enormous round rainbow with a large with spot in the middle. I have never seen anything like it – the ends of a rainbow are not supposed to touch – but these did; a perfect circle. And then it disappeared as conditions changed.

Two hours into the flight we are still flying over endless woods, punctuated by a thousand lakes with occasional signs of human habitation. We must be way up in Canada before starting to cross the Atlantic.

I prepared for my departure to Addis with a massage of my messed up upper back, shoulders and upper arms. The various tears have brought everything out of alignment. After the massage Abi taught me some yoga poses and exercises that will help strengthen the affected mussels. If only I had the discipline to do those three times a day.

Back home I interrupted my packing with a half-hearted attempt to make goat cheese but skipped a step in the process. I will not know whether I invented a new kind of goat cheese or made something that is inedible. The lesson is, when you need to pack two suitcases, one for summer in Ethiopia and the other for winter in Afghanistan, don’t try to make goat cheese before you finish the packing job.