Emerging, blinking, from an alternate dimension.
I do not sleep a wink on the plane from Ponce to Orlando. We land a half hour late in Orlando; our connection to Boston will be tight. Exiting the jetway, I ask the JetBlue agent where the flight to Boston is. She shrugs. “What gate is it at?” I try not to blow my stack like “Anger” in the movie Inside Out—while screaming inside, Why do you think I’m asking?— as she points to a monitor down to the left. We run to look. It’s at Gate 8. Where’s Gate 8? The opposite direction, of course. We sprint.
At the gate, boarding has completed. An agent with a clipboard says, “Carver and Palmer?” and waves us on. As we buckle in, I hear a couple of really loud clunks beneath us. Must be our leaden checked bags being hurled on by annoyed luggage handlers, I think. But nah, there’s no way our luggage will make this connection.
This flight from Orlando to Boston—oddly, given the number of flights cancelled because of the storm just two days ago—is not filled. We have room to stretch out a little, on opposite sides of the aisle. Doesn’t matter; I still can’t sleep.
The approach to Boston is unusually scenic. We fly right over Providence, and for the first time ever, I can pick out the campus of Brown University (my alma) below. Shortly after, we fly a lovely approach to Boston over the bay, circling to the north to line up for a southbound landing. It’s a perfect (but oversized) emulation of the standard general aviation traffic pattern, flying a downwind with a line of planes on final going by on the left, turning base above Beverly Airport, where Allysen (many years ago) took her first flying lesson with me in the back seat, and finally low and slow down the north shore to a perfect, if windy, landing at Logan. We are home.
Amazingly, our luggage is home, too. I can’t believe it when I see our two huge old suitcases on the carousel. Probably those loud clunks were our bags—tools and tree trunks and all—being thrown aboard.
Uber won’t connect on my phone, so we take a cab from a stand at the curb. Gazing at the snowy, gray, dreary, landscape, we can hardly believe we have just left the land of mosquitos and sunblock.
It will take several days before it feels real to be back in Boston (and to catch up on sleep).
We are amazed and grateful at what we accomplished in those two and a half weeks. If only we had been able to finish it all. But we didn’t, and so, soon, we are going to have to go back and do this all over again!
[And with that, we return you to Pushing a Snake Up a Hill, with its regular blog musings. To read The Ponce Chronicles straight through from beginning to end, here’s the complete adventure.]
Leave a Reply