Places of Transition

There are places in our lives of uncertainty, of difficulty, of more than we can handle. First, the difficulty. The job, my health, the surety that we could not continue down that path for much longer. So the decision and the transition, because without both we all remain the same, and in all the same places.

And after the decision, the transition. They are strange places, these transitions, foggy and unclear and never quite what we think they’ll be. Often they stretch longer than we thought, stranger than we planned, more exhausting than we wanted. Often they are nothing like we could have imagined.

If there is anything in the world that embodies transition, it is airports. And within them, the people, in their different clothes and different languages. In their different reasons to be gathered here and the exotic and mundane places that they go. In the ways they listen to the announcements and wait in lines and look for food.

And among the people, us.

Two small children, moving from a temporary home to a temporary home, more baggage than we can carry, two minutes late to our flight’s check in, and then not scheduled on another flight for four days, but praying, hoping we would get on a flight before the blizzard that was coming. Some said it would be a giant, some were unsure, some said 5 centimeters of snow, some said 15, but the weatherman and the neighbors and the airport workers said that at least the winds were coming that were too strong to allow the planes to fly.

So we waited, and explained to already uprooted children that we were waiting, and waited with their tears. And somehow, got on a plane the next day, a bigger one brought in to clear out the people fleeing before the storm, fleeing to jobs or homes or just away. And we buckled in, and brought out the toys, and soothed, and the plane taxied.

And taxied.

The passengers started murmuring and looking at each other, and the windows started icing, all of us becoming more and more sure that we would not leave. Becoming more sure that we would not make it out before the storm, that the swirling white clouds would ground us after all, that our plane would not be able to fly away above and through it.

But finally, an hour and a half later, with no explanation we took off, through the ice and rain, through the snow filled clouds, and through the darkness, landing in Toronto and found our bags just as we heard the announcement that all flights to and from Newfoundland were cancelled.

We settled in for our night at the airport before our Chicago flight the next morning; the only schedule they had been able to book for us to get us on our way.

We brought out pacifiers and blankies and cheap airport pillows and found the only food in the Toronto airport at 1am, (it was not good food) and tried to snuggle people down in chairs, because 1am at the airport lounges is when the stragglers come in, apparently, and we were the stragglers and all the long benches and the carpets were full of already sleeping people.

 

 

The snuggling never works quite as well as we hope it will, and then the seventeenth hour hits of everyone being awake, and almost everyone starts to cry, and heads start pounding, and every loud noise makes everyone want to scream.

And then, in a spare moment, Joe looked over at the flights screen to see our flight into Chicago light up as cancelled, among almost all the other perfectly fine flights, but not for us on that day, on that trip, in that place.

So he took Lincoln to figure out the hows and wheres and whys, and no one offered anything except another flight in another twelve hours, which would have meant twenty hours in that one airport, and thirty hours traveling to do what was supposed to be just a simple six hour trip. And it was looking like that was the only thing, that there wouldn’t be anything else left, when behind him a woman said, “Just fly into Milwaukee.” And with that suggestion from an interested stranger, we got a flight only a couple hours past what we would have done, and a few hours later were finally up in the air again, promising the boys that this time, for real, would be our last flight, that we were really almost done this time.

And so this trip, in the place of our transition, became a small sample of our lives right now. Having never missed a flight, had one cancelled, or had to rearrange because of weather, ever, in the space of 30 hours we had to do all three, in quick and ever difficult succession, on less sleep and patience each time, until we came to a place that still was not our home.

How really like our lives, in fact. How perfectly a picture of transition.