a sky without scars

I have not re-absorbed myself in the grief of those events of 10 years ago. There is quite enough grief in the world without stirring up the old things that lay mirred in the muck at the bottom of my heart. That is not to say that I haven't stopped and thought about the lives lost on that single day or in the wars of the intervening years. I have done my personal remembrances . . . I just have avoided the TV stuff, the public stuff.

Yet today, as I was driving through the Kansas prairie with Younger on our way home from a visit with my parents, my eye was drawn to a beautiful, pure blue sky, dotted with small, late summer clouds. This caused me to reflect upon my memories of the sky in the days that followed September 11.

We've all heard the jokes about "fly-over country" or "the fly-over states" . . . those places out here in the great middle that must be crossed to get to the "good" parts on the coasts? Well, from our perspective, on the ground to be flown over, it is true. We can lay in the green grass, gaze up at the blue and watch jet after jet zip-zag their way, stiching bridges across the sky.

In those days after September 11, when we were all silently, desperately thinking "what next?", the sky perplexed me. I could not figure out why. But the sky was most decidedly different. It disturbed me.

It disturbed me enough that at an outdoor lunch one day that week, I commented on my observation to my dear friend, Dave. I can remember him looking at me intently as I tried to come up with some philosophical reason that I saw the sky differently after this great tragedy. I was attempting to find some metaphysical or spiritual meaning out of a difference in the heavens.

He smiled at me wryly. Then, with the look on his face that said, "I will have patience with you, oh, unobservant one," he said, "The sky IS different. Physically. You know that, right?" And, as was typical of many of my conversations with Dave, I stopped and thought, "Uh oh. I've gone and missed one of life's great lessons. Again." I looked up at that sky and scanned for a difference . . . I struggled mightily to identify what was different. The color was the same pale blue of sky far away from great bodies of water. The clouds were white, they were puffy. The sky was, what I expected the sky to be. Except that somehow, inexorably it was different.

"There are no contrails," Dave said. Dave the former Naval pilot, of course, saw that difference immediately.

And suddenly I saw it. The network of artificial clouds that cris-cross our sky, creating a silvery-white web of scars across the belly of the great blue dome, were gone. It was as if the face of the Heavens was suddenly young, without those tell-tales lines at the corner of its eyes.

Today, I looked at the sky and tried to see the flaws created by contrails. I could not see them. I suspect it is that my eye is once again used to their disfigurement. Although there is one other possibility that nags at the back of my mind. Perhaps the scars humans created across our stratosphere fell to the earth on that day, 10 years ago. Perhaps they still lay here across the earth--like a giant spider's web--brushing our cheeks as we pass through them to remind us of the pain as we quietly pass through our days.