Thursday, August 13, 2009

Landing

I feel like I’ve been coming home for the past several weeks, months even. In the countdown I began in the upper margins of my journal. In the final letters I sent out to close friends, sealed for the last time with Peruvian postage stamps. In the packing and repacking that I did during my last days, pulling out one more item to give away with each gift or recuerdo I was given.

I knew it was time to leave when all I could talk about was home, my family, my friends, the job I hope to have and the colors I plan to paint my apartment walls. But that did not stop the tears from flowing when I gave one last hug to my host sister Carla at the bus station.

Nor did my face stay dry as I kept in view until the last possible instant, the line of my friends from Paz y Esperanza waving to me from the street as the bus crept around the corner, making its way out of Huánuco. Thus began my longish journey home.

My last ride over the mountains brought me to Lima where I stayed for a week with the other volunteers. We spent most of our time in a quiet Catholic retreat center in the middle of the city, preparing our hearts and minds for “re-entry,” as if returning from outer space.

I don’t think any of us knew what returning would look and feel like, but there was a sense that we might and surely would encounter a sense of the unknown, even in our own home towns.

We took a night plane together to Atlanta, Georgia and then branched off to make our respective flights back home, myself racing through customs only to miss my flight to Albany. With five hours until the next flight, I found I was grateful for the suspended time frame to just sit in the United States and observe the busy airport life.

First observation – how sparkling clean and well-dressed everyone looked, especially children with their McDonald’s happy meals, little backpacks and playing cards.

I sat for a while watching CNN, updating myself on missed news, only to find a repeating loop of three news stories – the investigation into Michael Jackson’s death, Michael Vick returning to the NFL and fortunately something worthwhile to learn about, the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor.

My sudden interest in current events reminded me of when my brother came to visit in December. I whiled away a long layover in the Lima airport by hungrily flipping through the New York Times he had brought and asking him for a rundown of the state of the economy.

It’s not that I didn’t care about world news during the year, but I did narrow down my focus somewhat. There was so much to absorb and understand in my immediate environment that I couldn’t help but detach from certain events and issues that simply seemed a world away.

I slept most of the way during my connecting flight to Albany, letting go of the anxiety I had been carrying. I tend to become increasingly superstitious when traveling home from far away places, worrying that something terrible might happen at the last possible moment.

As we began to lower over the Hudson River Valley, I trusted that we would in fact land in one piece and I was able to simply gaze longingly and lovingly at the landscape below. I’ve never felt so instinctively attached to a particular patch of earth. The color of the trees, the bend in the river, even the imagined smell of pine.

As we drew closer to the ground, more details of life appeared - elements that proved I was no longer in Peru. Free standing homes with sturdy roofs and turquoise colored swimming pools, a well-paved highway that shot out into the horizon, a parking lot filled with beaming yellow school buses. Markers of affluence and security.

With just a few feet separating the wheels of the plane from the runway, I savored the last instant of this feeling of suspension between two worlds, time held still between leaving and arriving.

And then, I was home, on ground that suddenly carried more significance. I was relieved. There was simply nothing else to do but walk into my mother’s arms and then hug my dad, letting loose the rest of my tears and feeling the joy of being welcomed home.