Connecting Through Cincinnati

The plane is coming into Cincinnati Airport, over the intense green of Kentucky. There is the Ohio River, and there is the interstate and I know that the interstate falls in a long hill down towards the river and then crosses into the city.

There are so many rivers, the land is wrinkled with them. So familiar this place where I grew up, Cincinnati, this small town that happens to have a million people in it. A place I never wanted to be home because my life felt so small there and now it isn't because there is no family for me there anymore and yet it is so familiar that it is an ache. If I don't belong here, and nothing else is so achingly familiar, where do I belong?

And we fall towards the green hills, and I remember my cousins flying in from Arizona and the youngest kept saying what is that? what is that? and they kept laughing and saying, trees! So much water on a green green land and, I told my students in China, those children of farmers, where I come from, the problem is not drought but drainage, and they laughed.

And we touch down. I am here for thirty minutes, and then lifted away again, over a landscape, bird's eye view that no human should ever have expected to see. Icarus falling and lifted up again. Strange dislocations of technology. Temporarily homeless and in flight.