Prelude; Shuffling Toward Real

Mountain music, and context for the following day...

The trouble started the tenth of January...

Here we are; the day before. In twenty-four hours we shall oscillate from security to airborne to layovers and a wholly different landscape than the one I see out my window. My bags are packed and we tick down the hours to the ride to the airport.

The shit is getting real...

All my bits of apprehension and other fears bubble to the surface. This is the first time I've crammed myself into an airplane in nearly ten years. Part of me wants to get fabulously roaring drunk. There was the acquaintance who offered me some of her special brownies-mountains-and I consider contacting her. Perhaps then I'd not be so wound up.

Then I think of not wanting to miss anything. I wonder how much I'll sleep in the next twenty-four hours, and how much of that will be because of insomnia. I question whether I'll bother to read any of the book I packed for the journey.

It was habit I collected my weather data. The routine of knowing how to dress for the following day. As I often say, I live where playing outside is holy sacrament and I like to know if I need a sweater. It is supposed to be nineteen here tomorrow. For me, after early morning, that will become irrelevant.

I could speak to the concept of between I first read mentioned by the Dragonriders of Pern-roughly thirty-thousand feet-being far colder. That the locations we lay over and our ultimate destination will be warmer. The fact I'll not be tracking weather conditions or pellet stove fuel usage for the next ten days has been one of my bugaboos, though no one I've mentioned this to has expressed sympathies, and this vexes me.

So, I go for a walk around town. It is fifteen degrees out with no breeze, just nice and crisp. The sky is clear. I find the walk to be soothing, reminding me this is my Kashmir. I come back home and listen to the radio, taking in the peaks, which surround my house. My mountains. This is my place in the world and I know I will return to it, but, things are about to change. For ten days, I will have none of this. I will be elsewhere.

I must not fear...