A-PEAR-antly it's Autumn

Thanks so much to everyone who called, texted, and commented to see how I was during the hurricane. Your concern and well wishes meant a lot....especially because scheduling forgot about me.

But I was merely inconvenienced by Ike. There were flight attendants stuck in much worse situations, let alone residents of Houston and Galveston. It's not on CNN anymore, but they are still recovering and will be for a while.

I have to hand it to the grounds crew at IAH and my company for getting things up and running so quickly. We were shut down completely, big sections of the airport were trashed, and yet just two days later, almost all the flights were running (relatively) on time.

Which meant that I was back to work as well. I was called for a decent three-day trip.

The first night was a short layover in Seattle near the airport. The hotel is beautiful, and I went for a drizzly walk in the surrounding neighborhood.

I blogged previously about this area in May, how spring was just starting, far behind NJ and MD. Now it felt much the same, cool air scented with woodsmoke, but this time it was the result of an of an early and plentiful fall. A foreshadowing for my east coast existence.

Even strips of land near the roads were heavy with foliage, wildflowers, blackberries and fruit trees. Despite a few odd looks, I couldn't help having my own little harvest festival, tossing apples and pears into my purse with purple stained fingers from blackberries eaten on the spot.

The next day I carefully padded my produce and endured a few more strange looks from TSA (I'm almost immune to them now).

I still had to overnight in Cleveland, so I lighted my load by sharing with my crew, and enjoyed their looks of gratitude and admiration. "You picked them yourself?"

Normally I would be delighted to layover in Cleveland, but we changed hotels. Now we are much closer to the airport, but much farther from the parks...and without bicycles. I went for a walk anyway to soak in the Midwest sunset.

I ended up in Berea, apparently a small college town and there was a football game going on with all the accompanying festivities, so I got my dose of autumnal Americana in Ohio.

Continuing on I saw a sign for St. Adalbert's Roman Catholic Church, so I strolled in that direction. Across from the church and school a charming fixer-upper on a large plot of land was for sale. It was unoccupied, so I sat on the front steps for a few moments gazing at the landscape and imagined myself living here with a thriving garden, a few children, a few chickens and the chance to attend daily mass.

Being in Ohio triggers some dangerous nesting instinct in me. I stopped just short of calling the realtor for a little more info.

The flight of the trip was from Ft. Lauderdale back to Newark. During boarding an older Hispanic woman was struggling to lift her bag into the overhead. The other flight attendant tried to assist, but it was too heavy for him too. He offered her a plastic bag so she could remove some items and the suitcase manageable, but she spoke no English. She grew more flustered, and he grew more frustrated, so motioned her to the back galley and put much sketchy Spanish to work.

At last a look of relief spread across her face and she happily took the plastic bag from me and unzipped her suitcase. Out came some flip flops, a shirt or two, followed by about eight whopping avocados the size coconuts. And there were still half a dozen in her suitcase.

I couldn't help but laugh out loud. To her credit, she smiled apologetically and responded with something I interpreted as "These are very good and you can't get them in New Jersey."

Thinking of the bag full of pears and apples wrapped in a hotel towel and slowing making their way across the country in my carry-on, I assured her I understood.