We are preparing to land.  My left ear is starting to pain.  Maybe I didn’t take enough cold and sinus advil.   I rummage through my carryon bag desperately trying to find my little pill case.

The gentleman beside me, my seat mate, is watching with anticipation “what is she going to dig out of her bag,” I dream he is thinking.

He appears to be in his late 50’s or early 60’s.  His smell reminds me of Sunday afternoons at Saunders Street. Sitting on the living room floor playing with Pluto and Donald Duck.

What ever happened to those plastic figurines after my Nana’s passing, I will never know.  But I liked that living room.  The social tea cookies and the little tin Nana stored them in. The upright piano and the looming blacksmith painting hanging above it. The wooden side tables with the adjustable pot lamps built right in. 

My grandad siting at one end of the room, happy, watching us play and making conversation with us.  Suggesting that my sister and I might one day both be missionaries, together. My sister, sitting by my side, vehemently disagreeing.

I felt hurt as a 5 year old that my sister wouldn’t want to go on a blind adventure with me.  Who cares if it’s missionary work, it’ll be fun, we’ll always be together, forever. But in my sisters 6 and 1/2 year old world, I was an annoying younger sister who one day, she’d be rid of.

Of course I don’t really know what she was thinking when she disagreed but at 5 years old, she was rejecting ME,  not an honorable but perhaps obscure, homeless, missionaries life.

All this from sitting beside a man who smells like my grandad did some 30 years ago!