dawn's early lights

Up well before dawn to catch an early plane out of LA, we tiptoed around the cats - that is, Lucy and DandeLion's mother and brothers - making coffee, trying not to create too much disturbance, avoiding too much light hitting our own eyes. By the time we were leaving the house, to be sure, it was pretty much light, so we had one last deep inhale of jasmine blossom, and hit the road in the rental car (a curious creature that looked a bit like a shrunken hearse, and claimed to run on ethanol).

But that first phrase - "an early plane" - isn't quite an accurate one. We were on two planes - Alice had airmiles on a CO flight, and I had a much cheaper (and airmile-earning) flight on AA. At LAX, on our cellphones, we raised cups of coffee to each other, in our separate terminals, vowing - despite the financial practicalities of the above arrangement - not to take separate flights in future. Nonetheless, we thought we had synchronicity - we were due to arrive at EWR within a quarter of an hour of each other.

Alice, however, is still in LA. I turned on my phone to a barrage of increasingly anxious emails from a plane that needed repairing, was unloaded, loaded up again, passengers again taken off - so tomorrow morning, again at 5 a.m., she will be up to the light of these very same lanterns, re-smelling the hedge, and trying again.