By: Stephanie Reynolds
“Aww man, I’m sorry, Babe…” The Wonder Sweetie confessed with an “I-messed-up-and-feel-terrible-please-don’t-be-mad” tone I could hear over the phone.
He was buying tickets for me to come back home from Colorado after a sorrowful, but not unexpected, funeral. Flying to and from Alaska almost invariably entails a layover at SeaTac but usually not the twelve-hour layover that he had missed somehow when making the reservations for me.
Lest you think I am throwing my husband under a whole fleet of Greyhounds, let me say that The Wonder Sweetie is a logistical master. In fact, that was his job—logistics. He is brilliant and thorough and conscientious…and also slightly dyslexic.
“It’s okay, Babe, no worries,” I said and meant it. Our family had been having a really rough summer. We were all struggling and this was a small thing.
I will spare you the details of my time in Denver, but between heartache and altitude sickness, I was “done fer.” By the time I landed in Seattle though, time, water, and a pressurized cabin helped, and I was able to even get a little bit excited about my layover. I had twelve hours to spend in an airport before I could go home. What to do to pass the time by myself among strangers? Explore the airport! I winked at a hastily made budget and began my mini-adventure.
I took my time visiting the shops like I was at a mall. I spent too much money on gifts, but not TOO too much money. Just enough “too much money” to feel like a splurge for my family without a sick feeling in my tummy about the bill.
I got my nails done. I never get my nails done, but it seemed the perfect time. Coat after coat of the most dramatic red nail polish I had ever seen turned my nails from “weary” to “WOW!” from “High Stress” to “High Style.” The rest of me might look like I was rode hard and put up wet, but my nails looked like I was ready to go to the poshest gala of the season. I bought two bottles of nail polish and kept them for years, even after they had gotten thick and gummy from time and air.
I lingered over an overpriced but delicious pizza whilst watching the sun set through giant glass windows, feeling the same wash of melancholy I have always felt at sunset since I was a kid. After a summer filled with wringing and wrenching of my emotions, at least that felt exactly the same.
And I watched people. When I got tired of watching people in one section of the airport, I watched people in another section. Airports are such amazing, almost-physics-breaking places. On the surface they are merely a transportation hub, a literal means to a topographical end, but one doesn’t have to be a philosopher to break through the manifest surface to the meaning underneath. Airports are a bubble, a waypoint, a hesitation between travel. Airports link people to the blue of their dreams or the clouds of their fears. Airports (and the planes that come to then leave them) impassively, calmly, expect you to drop control of your immediate future, to leave your life in the hands of skilled pilots, smiling flight attendants, and authoritative (literal) gatekeepers.
They are a place of Almost But Not Yet for every person—”I am ALMOST to the convention…I am ALMOST on vacation…I am NOT YET on the plane…I am NOT YET home.”
Travelers, some exhausted, some excited, provided a constantly evolving visual of life-in-suspension like beads in a lava lamp. Slowly weaving around other beads. Drifting…but not outside security. Checked in but not boarding. Restless and resting. Almost and Not Yet.
It would be tempting to fret about being away from my family, to be frustrated and worn thin from the events of the day, week, season, but I truly think that it was a blessing, a gift just for me. I was given a twelve-hour bubble of timeless, weightless, “enclosed but not trapped.” I didn’t have to cry or not cry, laugh or not laugh, talk or not talk.
I was free to roam the halls of the concourse and of my heart. To process, to linger, to ponder, to pray.
Eventually, my gatekeeper started making her cheerful boarding announcements. I shuffled into line with my fellow beads and wound my way through the stars for home, incredibly thankful to the Lord for a husband with a touch of dyslexia.
By: Stephanie Reynolds, Athens-Limestone Tourism Association
March 21, 2025
