We fly above our town and pick out places from the air. The flat top roofs of the stores along Main Street are covered with strips of gray roofing, air conditioners and vents. On top of the movie theater is a short tower my uncle tells us is an old style chiller that uses water to cool the theater. Woolworth has a bunch of empty clothes racks stacked in one corner. My uncle circles wider and we see all the squares of farmland, different colors for different crops. He follows the creek until the farms become pasture, and then up into the mountains until all the creek is is water seeping from rocks and then he takes us up higher and shows us the lake the water is seeping from and then he follows the river that feeds into the lake. Way before we are tired of flying he turns the little plane back toward the airport and radios the tower for a place to land.
“This is the hardest part,” he says to us in our headsets.
“Is it hard to land the plane?” I ask with a little concern.
“Oh, no,” he answers with a big grin, “I just hate to leave the sky.” He lands just as smooth as peanut butter on bread, not a single bump or squeak. He taxies the plane back to the space it had been parked in before and lets the engine idle down while we take off our headsets and unbuckle from our seats. Nobody talks much on the way back home, there is just too much to think about. As we drive into the residential area everything looks different, smaller and less impressive compared to the view of mountains, and rivers, and grasslands from high above.