Free Write Friday: Flight

A toddler is whimpering a few rows in front of me, the cries familiar but blessedly not emitting from one of my own children. Crystals form at the edge of the triple-paned window, a patchwork of tan fields replacing snow-capped mountains below.

I relish the window seat as we cross the country, no one chatting at me, no requirement to interact. The three women traveling alone in my row are not interested in conversing. We pull out our novels, our iPads, our Bluetooth headphones to mutually ignore via podcast. It feels luxurious, this solitude in flight, this lack of responsibility.

I do wonder about the strangers that fill the narrow seats behind me, that line the rows in front. What are they doing? Where are they going? Where are they from? Are they heading home or on vacation or on business? Are the cramped quarters with scant sustenance and stale recycled air an annoyance or a reprieve from daily monotony, the chores of home life?

I’m most curious about my seat mate but I don’t make small talk until we’ve almost landed. I saw her credit card when she bought a Tom Douglas chicken curry bowl deceptively wrapped in aluminum foil, reminiscent of a TV dinner. Block letters eked out “Fred Hutch,” indicating the large cancer research institute famous in the Northwest. I wonder, is she a MD, a PhD? Is she a researcher or a clinician? Does she have children?

Throughout the flight she studied a sheet of paper with neat type and mumbled quietly to herself. She must be giving a talk. I bet she’s a mom, no time to practice her lecture until she’s suspended 10,000 feet in the sky, away from the demands of making dinner and wiping noses, of sticky fingers and work reports and piles of laundry and school paperwork. I want to know her all of a sudden, understand who she is and where she’s going. I venture a question as the landing gear deploys below.

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Free Write Friday: Retreat

You plan months ahead to make it work. Line up sitters, meal plan for the following week, organize an overnight weekend at Grandma’s house. It feels luxurious, the silence and the resting in words. “Thinking is work.” You read it on a bumper sticker weeks ago and it remained with you, rolling over in your mind. You wrote it on a post-it and stuck it to your computer. Thinking is work but it’s not valued, not reimbursed in our quantifiable, time card, excel spreadsheet world. 

So you plan. You prepare excessively just so you can have the time, the space to think. You kiss your babies goodbye, leave them with Costco lasagnas and Daddy’s breakfast-for-dinner. You drive to the ferry terminal, eat clam chowder, thick with cream, chewy and loaded with immersed oyster crackers punctuating each bite. You cross to the peninsula, familiar from childhood jaunts with your family: damp woods to explore, saline air stinging nostrils, small town diners with stiff grilled cheese hugging cups of tomato soup. 

In the dark it’s a struggle. You find the communal house on the old military fort, now converted into housing for writing retreats, community events. Odd to think these dusty buildings used to be barracks. You came here for your medical school orientation weekend, sleeping bags tucked under arms, eyeing strangers with anticipatory reluctance, a peculiar Junior High start to the four years of forming physicians into being. You also came here for medical residency retreats. Each spring you’d all gather, let loose in the way a group working 36 hour days, 100 hour weeks, caring for the critically ill must. 

The drafty house smells familiar, like ghosts of orientations past reside. Here are strangers, unbonded to you, a writerly community. All introverts, you’re bound by the thinking, the thinking is work. You write and you read. You walk and you sit. The seaside air suffuses your mottled skin, still tensile but hinting at fine lines and transition into middle age. You can think here. You can create. It’s work, but it’s inspired. And those other selves, those other lifetimes, those other beings of retreats past dance on the floorboards, float through the drafty air, haunt the tap-tapping as letters form into words creating sentences giving meaning to the empty page. 

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