The rows of plants she tends are only a part of the place that is hers. They may cover more acreage, but the heart is found elsewhere. Perhaps it is a clapboard house nearby set near a dusty road that can be followed to neighbors, towns beyond. None are there at this moment, but there may be children at school, or riding that dusty road back to that house in a dusty, bouncing, yellow bus. And there may be a husband at work elsewhere on the property. Fixing a bearing on one of the giant wheels of one of the radial sprinklers. Laying pipe to extend irrigation to a fallow section of the farm. Tending livestock.

His name might be Sam. Maybe Samuel at birth, and still sometimes on Sundays. Also physically shaped and colored by their lives here, and with an equally fierce determination. It is a hard life, but the values are tangible and immediate and warrant his full commitment. He, too, could’ve come from elsewhere, brought here by her, or the reverse. Or by chance, or raised here as his father and his father’s father before him. Which origin would yield a slightly different facet to Sam’s character, but Sam is here, and now, in this place. And no other.

Long after the shadow of the plane in which I travel has sped past them unnoticed, they may converge on that house at day’s end. A weary touch to acknowledge each other before entering to begin the evening’s rituals of meals, household chores, homework. And stepping onto the porch of that home, they may cast a backwards glance at the skies I have so admired from my vastly different vantage point, and then go inside less moved. These clouds do not promise the rain on which Sam and Maddie depend. Other clouds on other days will give them that, they hope, but these are the fluff of summer, more of interest to their children in the afternoon fields after school, and more for their seductive evocations of familiar shapes from their earthbound lives. The gray gradient I rued that other flight and its attendant drizzle will get a welcome reception when next it visits this place.

Inside that house all the belonging is centered. The majority of the labors may be outside, but all of that investment is connected by views through the windows from within, still present and palpable. And within is yet more earnest labor, and something that cannot be seen from without. Can’t actually be seen as distinct from anything else from the inside, either, but quite visible in the fabric of the place and the ways the people interact, communicate. Belonging. Love. Intention. Grace.

After supper, in a rare moment of ease, they may take some of that belonging out onto the porch and gaze from simple chairs out across the dusk landscape at the place where they live their lives, and cast out with their senses to the whole of what they and millenia of natural forces have wrought there. Not as I do now, with mere words, but with an open intimacy of knowledge and hard-won care. And perhaps with a deep gratitude.

Rain may fall later on this place, crystal water/blood that came from distant oceans, or travelled the xylem of the tree just beyond the porch, or that of the blades of grasslands in Siberia. It will come from above, falling through the air that fills their lungs and fires their bodies, and which held aloft the airplane from where I have been given a moment’s vision of workings both vast and intimate, glimpses that unite me to all the planet’s water, rock and plant. And to imaginary strangers whose very real manifestations caught my eye from a couple of miles above them.

It will come, as does the love that binds us, the rights we give ourselves, and the visions that carry us to places unseen with eyes too filled with the familiar, or blinded by overwhelming vastness, from nothing much at all. From where I was, and where they are. Born of intention, fueled by desire, fleshed out by awareness, but created out of the infinitely renewable and powerful nothing always available, but not often consciously tapped except in brief moments of insight. Just so. From the air.