Today is… our 7th anniversary. We are flying today to visit family.
I watched the sun rise in the east and as we now decend into Baltimore for our layover. I am looking down at the houses with all the yards. The big yards unlike in Florida whereat houses are in subdivisions and you own like a foot around your house. I miss having a big yard like that.
Looking down as we take off again on our second flight. I see all the neighborhoods with the dormant trees all around the homes, grey with hibernation for the winter months. I actually miss that. It reminds me of home and my childhood on Long Island. The sound of chainsaws in winter cutting down the trees for firewood and the smell of wood burning stoves and fireplaces all around. That familiar winter smell mixed with the smell of snow. You could actually smell when it was going to snow. Sometimes I get that scent in Florida but it always means rain there.
That was life in our little tri hamlet area on the south shore of Long Island not too far from the beach. We spent summers on Smith’s Point beach or at Shirley town beach on the Great South Bay where I took swimming lessons as a kid. Summers waiting daily for the ice cream man to come and begging my mom for money to get a bomb pop. Or perhaps perhaps at my friend Madeline’s house where her mom would make juice ice cubes with toothpicks in them with the sounds of menudo in the background.
Sometimes I would be playing Barbies or digging around in the dirt mound in front of our house left by the builders playing with my matchbox cars or Star Wars figures. Sometimes I was riding bikes through the many acres of woods and climbing trees with my friends Kenny and David who lived down my street. Good times.
Back then we came home when the street lights came on and didn’t see our families for hours. We rode our bikes to our little town on Neighborhood road to get to the candy store (Benny’s) or John’s pizzeria in summertime. In winter we played for hours in the snow until our little feet were frozen.
Those days of innocence, when did they leave us? I don’t recall the transition, yet we all have varying shades of jadedness from our experiences.
“For all our mutual experience of separate conclusions are the same” -Billy Joel “Summer, Highland Falls”
We are now landing At our destination. I’m looking down at the snow covered ground and frozen lakes of the towns below. While I am in New England and not Long Island I feel a little closer to home.
