Airplanes: A love story

After a year and a half we have a contract on our house and we will move into a different house in another part of our city. We've lived here for over five years and one thing I will miss deeply is living under a flight pattern for our city airport.

When I was a girl and my family was shopping for a new home, I recall two big rules for choosing a good location: 1. Not backing to a busy street. 2. Not near an airport.

I've since learned rule #2 does not apply to me because the sound of an airplane rumbling toward our house sends me flinging curtains aside and shouting, "airplane! come look!", every time. 

I think this love came upon me by proxy through my toddler Jack a few years ago.  Like many toddler boy fascinations--construction trucks and cars--airplanes were one of them. We would gawk in wonder, time after time, pointing up. "Ah-plane", he called them. Now that he is five and Nora is two, and not as taken by them as he was, my love for planes endures and is outlasting even their wonder.

I've been wondering why. Why, after seeing maybe hundreds of airplanes fly by in the past five years, do I still look with anticipation to see what is flying by?  I keep rolling metaphors around in my head trying to pinpoint the reason for my endearment. I feel like my adoration is deep and subconscious. So far, I have enough reasons to start an entire blog on airplane love, so I'll try to summarize. Ready?  This is going to be one of those "write to figure it out" experiences for me.

I love the sound, the power of jet engines zipping souls through the air in encapsulated safety.
I love their lines and the gray silhouette against the sky. Blue and Gray.
I love what they represent in my memory: vacation, adventure, the world.
I love riding in them and seeing the ground below as a quilt.
I love the history of their invention and development.
I could go on...and on...like I said--airplane blog.

Airplanes, to me, are moving art merged with scientific marvel in my favorite canvas, the sky. When I look at the sky, in any state, my soul stirs. The variegated blue inspires creative thinking. Gray churning clouds remind me of my powerlessness, and conversely, God's power. Like a canvas, the sky is often a starting place for me in prayer. Airplanes flying past my house pull my eyes upward to the sky, reminding me. I remember God is present and surrounding. They remind me of God's immensity and how He gifted humanity with creativity and ingenuity enough to create something so intuitively illogical as a giant hunk of metal floating weightlessly.

Airplanes are part of my scenery, mixed with my natural surroundings. We live deep in suburbia where the minimal vegetation is still young and tiny. We sit on a slight hill overlooking a sea of rooftops with a backyard void of plants. Being a naturalist at heart (but now pretty citified if I'm honest), what I love about our setting is when I look out any window in our house, I see three quarters sky. Rooftops and sky.

A plane's low hum draws my eye to the sky. I am reminded to dream big, to pursue the impossible in my own world, like the Wright Brothers did in theirs. I'm reminded that God surrounds me in my pursuit of living and loving; there always in the endless blue, gray and black.

Our new home will most likely be away from my beloved place under the air-traffic. I guess some airplane art on my walls will be a tiny consolation for me.

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