Airplanes and Storage Units
Airports… a place of excitement as people are lifting off on holiday, weddings, vacation spots and adventures to new places. The flight travels via the blue unknown. We are off on business or to see a friend or family member we have not seen in ages. We are off to celebrate. We fly home refreshed and renewed.
Storage units…. temporary location for our belongings as we transition into a new and bigger home. We are relocating to a new state and are in need of a short stop for our “stuff”. We can retrieve it when our life is in order. Perhaps we are overflowing with furniture and are awaiting that neighborhood yard sale in order to gather funds to take that flight to a faraway place listed on a bucket list.
I realized today this could not be further from the truth. Awareness to the truth of real life and real stories is not always so pretty. My storage unit consists of my own paintings with no wall space to display, photo albums, rare books, handmade furniture and many other things that do not fit in my downsized life since my husband passed away. My storage unit is the place I go to when I am grasping for air away from the business of everyday burdens. I go and sit and smell memories. I can breath there because I am surrounded by tactile memories that are precious. God meets me there everytime because He knows my history. He knows I do not covet. He knows I am a visual person who is sparked by color and smell. He knows me better than I know myself. Down the concrete corridor on isle 5 is the women storing her recently deceased father’s things as she settles his estate. She helped me lift a box today and we cried together without ever even exchanging names. Around the corner behind the large metal door is the man with NASCAR memorabilia stacked on 3 walls and piled to the ceiling along with a Dale Earnhart jacket he just can’t seem to let go of because it carries the sweet scent of his wife taken by cancer. Two isles down and several doors over is rented by an 80 plus year old man brilliantly skilled at building picture frames and refuses to let retirement dictate his days. We became friends as I helped him locate a flashlight he keeps losing. We are now friends and check in every now and again. The maintenance man who sweeps and cleans the long tin hallways, picking of the remanence of the threads we leave behind as we are gathering our collections and locking them up. He matters and so does his story. People have incredible tales we often assume are trivial compared to ours. Is our assumption due to avoidance?
When I fly, I seem to always be seated in coach next to someone who is traveling away from a broken marriage, lost loved one or family trauma. The women from NC who left a son in Alaska possibly not to see him for several years because he will be deployed. The person in Row F on her way to NY in search of a missing daughter. On the flight to Colorado sits 2 US Marshalls on their way to retrieve a man who murdered a teenager on the East Coast. Extraordinary circumstances lead to incredible stories.
Airports and Storage units would not have anything in common if not for the stories of the people they accommodate.