Airports and Armrests
Finding home in a world gone mad.
Lately, the days have been difficult. I try not to watch much news, but my husband does, both on the TV and online, where he intersperses his doom scrolling with hysterical reels from The Dog Pack. I walk that fine line between staying aware and not falling into despair.
I’ve been writing about the love I have for this beautiful and special place where I live. But I have also been witness to the effects of greed and power choking the life out of the people, the land, the waters surrounding us.
In Key West, we like to say we don’t live in Florida, we live in Key West. Well, Florida has finally come to Key West. Or should I say it’s come for Key West.
Our rainbow crosswalk in the crosshairs of Tallahassee will likely be painted over with blacktop. Our immigrant neighbors - mothers, fathers, business owners - are being hunted on our streets. Untreated wastewater is leaking out of shallow wells into the waters close to shore. Our city fathers and mothers are ignoring best practices of monitoring and protecting problems such as this.
So, it’s a challenge to keep the faith. And yet, I cannot let this be the only thing I see. the only thing I think about.
I’ve been writing about flying home to Key West. How I never want to leave, but sometimes I do. And because we are so out of the way of major flight routes, I’m thrown into the land of airport hubs with their tentative connections, frequent delays and unexpected cancellations, which provide lots of opportunities to observe the whole spectrum of who we now in this time and particular place.
It’s not a particularly pretty picture.
On my last flight back, I was stuck in Miami for for a delay that initially was supposed to be “brief.” Something about an armrest.
An hour later, still waiting and bored to the edge of somnambulance, I began thinking back to another time when I was trapped here waiting for a plane. Covid was still at thing then. It was late at night. The place was almost empty.
A young mother sat one seat away from me. Between us, her toddler daughter, “two and a half,” the mother said, was cleaning the empty seat with a couple of Kleenexes.
“You’re a good cleaner,” I told her.
“She has to be,” her mother said. “She’s inheriting a dirty world.”
Three years later, it’s only gotten dirtier.
Finally, the armrest is fixed. We board the plane. It’s a short flight, only about twenty-five minutes. As we descend out of the clouds, I look out of the window and there it is, stretching out below us, that impossibly beautiful seascape of pale aqua and deep blue and emerald green, dotted with tiny mangrove islands and powdery-white slashes of sandbar shallows. I press my face against the window and everything else drops away, all the fears, the concerns, the smallness of small things.
The author Margaret Renkl, in the book, The Comfort of Crows, writes, “The world lies before you, a garden. However hobbled by waste, fouled by graft, and tainted by deception, it will always take your breath away.”
This world is dirty and scary. And also sacred. I lose sight of that when I only see the ugliness and forget the immense truth of what I am connected to in heart and spirit.
This beauty. This sea. This life.
And my love for it.
The plane banks westward and dips over the island. It looks like a miniature doll house of a town. I’m filled with wonder and giddy kind of joy knowing I am home.
Home.
It’s taken so long to get here.