Billy and Ashley got married this weekend. It was a sweet haphazard wedding, we ate lots of pie, Ashley forgot to throw the bouquet, I hugged cousins, and neither of my grandparents fell on the ice that coated northern Minnesota, so really the whole thing was a roaring success.

Last night my mom and I had a connecting flight from Chicago coming home. Now, I am not a city person. Three days has always been more than enough for me, and on top of that there is a nagging voice in my head which tells me I should love nature best. You know, #creation and all that. But we had a long, clear descent into Chicago at about seven-thirty their time. Seven-thirty when everyone is home and eating dinner and doing homework and watching TV and making plans and finishing laundry. Seven-thirty when all the lights are on, and dim little headlights reach out in front of sojourning cars, and streetlights duck behind trees and back out again as you pass ten thousand feet above them. There are patterns in the street plans, you know; they wind and gloam, stretching themselves into the darkness. Floodlights cast their own drops of gold, and downtown blocks form complex, glittering mountains that wink and beckon. And it is all so very vast. Forgive me if I ignore that preachy voice in my head, and tell you that is the view I love the best. I could be one of those people who live in a suspended glass box for weeks on end, just so long as mine was particularly high.

I don’t have any real metaphor to draw. I’ll leave that up to you if you’re so inclined. I’m just coming to terms with the fact that my imagination is usually wrong, because often Reality won’t fit inside of it at all. So I simply want to tell you how much I love heights and fairy lights and grandeur and distance, things endowed with impossible grace.