I can see my house from here...

While I was out walking the dog tonight, I ascertained what I already kinda knew--we are on the landing pattern from the Hartford Springfield Airport.

Several planes passed over from the south-west heading north east and coming down while Bela sniffed month old snow and considered passing water or other bodily waste.

So, when you flying into Bradley from most anywhere south of here, you could look down and see our house. Right now it's the one with 9 foot piles of snow near the driveway. In the spring it would be the one with a multitude of brightly colored flowers. In the summer, the flowers and shrubs will be in full bloom. In the fall, there is a red maple in the back yard and a barking Puli on the deck.

So, if you fly into Bradley International Airport from the south, look down and see our house.

The one time my father visited before I went to West Virginia and collected him to come live with us for a few weeks until he started wandering away and then he lived in a nursing home in Hamden: that one time he was a free man and visiting his only child and his daughter in law and his two grand children, the stewardess noticed his last name was "Bradley".

"You're going to 'your' airport," she told him. And she brought him a free bourbon on the rocks because his name was the name of the airport whose landing path is over our house in Cheshire.

He enjoyed that wondrously and talked about it until he began to only talk about things that happened before I was born, and probably you too.

Here's what to ponder under your Castor Oil Tree today: what could you say to a stranger that would mean so much to them they'd talk about it years later?

Welcoming strangers, the Christian (and Jewish and Muslim and Buddhist) sacred writings all tell us, is like welcoming Angels unaware.

Perhaps we should all speak to a stranger every day and try to say something that makes them remember it.

How would that alter the occurring of the universe for both the stranger and us?

Something to ponder, sitting there under your Castor Oil Tree. Like Jonah...like me...like you....