From: rimrun@halcyon.com (Rimrunner)
Newsgroups: talk.bizarre
Subject: Of Hearts and Homes
Date: 2 Dec 1997 12:45:00 -0800
Organization: paid to be polite to paranoiacs
Lines: 62
Message-ID: <661s0c$6up$1@halcyon.com>
Summary: I haven't slept so it's still Dec. 1st

When I woke up this morning, I felt an attachment to the room I lay in,
the house, the view of suburbia complete with leafless trees; an
attachment stronger than I was prepared for. I hadn't lived here, really,
for five years. And yet nowhere but here has ever felt so much like home.
I watch the runway speeding by, thinking about the days when I would have
given anything to leave this place.

I love to fly, and I always request a window seat.

It's an overcast day in Maryland, and soon the clouds obscure the ground
below. Cloudy days in Maryland aren't like cloudy days in western
Washington. I haven't figured out the difference yet. Something about the
light.

Maryland is mostly flat. The area where I grew up, near D.C., is after all
a river delta. Flying over the mid-Atlantic region, one sees patches of
forest and cultivated lane, bordered by roads and rivers. You can tell
when you're getting near a city, because the occasional clusters of
buildings suddenly increase in size and number. From the plane it all
looks like the model railroad my high school boyfriend had in his
basement.

(I quit being angry at him at hott.bob. Really.)

Eight hours later, coming down over Seattle. I stare out the window into
the night. From this high, the city is a glittering tapestry, black fabric
embroidered with gold and silver and red and blue that sparkle. Stars,
like the city, can be hell when you get close, but they're both pretty
from far away.

As the plane drops lower, features of the landscape become visible. Hills.
Lakes. Even rivers. I can pick out Redmond, Lake Washington with its
bridges, downtown Seattle. It's actually hard to spot the Space Needle
from the air, but the Kingdome's easy to see. It's funny that for all the
years I lived in Maryland, I still don't recognize it from the air, except
for the general characteristics.

It's not that there's anything that I dislike about Maryland,
particularly; it was just always such an ordinary place to me, even though
D.C. was only minutes away and there were woods to hike in and sloughs to
canoe in and Baltimore. And you can't go anywhere without tripping over a
Civil War monument of some sort. And neighborhood legend has it that a
hiding place for runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad is buried in
my parents' backyard, though no one's ever done any excavating to find
out.

Seattle has a different history. It has a different personality, I guess,
full of displaced east coast expatriates like me who get jobs at high-tech
companies and drink too much coffee and become beer snobs.

I have at least three homes. Each one feels different, in a home-y sort of
way. Do I have three hearts? Are there three of me? Or more?

Rimrunner
more or less
--
Murder of Crows official web site: http://www.nwlink.com/~noah/
"Science is a way of talking about the universe in words that bind it 
to a common reality. Magic is a method of talking to the universe in
words that it cannot ignore. The two are rarely compatible." -- _The
	Books of Magic_, Neil Gaiman
--