Last Saturday xmurf, lilsquishy and I flew down to the Evergreen Aviation Museum. It was a great day for flying, with a piercing blue sky like hammered glass and thin thready combed-silk clouds. Lots of archwinged seagulls testing the wind in loops and spirals and long tapered dives way below us. Mount Ranier was so bright I had to squint through burning tears, and so beautiful I did it until dark mountain afterimages clouded the sunlight, a jagged apparation of cold white flame, like a snowflake inside out. The cascades were layered blue and white so sharp I was worried they might crack the shatterglass sky.
The museum was fascinating, as always, and I got to see boojum (even if we were two hours late, whoops. Apparently the guys at the airport down there told her pilots were always late. Hee!) but my favorite part was definitely the flight home. We left just after sunset, when misty purple twilight uncurled and stretched in the valleys. The moon a knife-edge silver crescent in a velvety sky. I had no idea there were so many purples in the universe. Mount Saint Helens looms ghostly in the twilight - an uneven pale blue shimmer come loose from its misty moorings and keeping pace with the plane. The cities and towns we fly by are golden and sparkly - all the towns in Oregon and Washington, it seems, have many trees in the streets, and the lights flicker on and off from the air as trees get in the way. They are strange, fey things, shifting faerie circles, light caught in spiderwebs.
And home to Seattle, city of my heart, where the wind touches the indigo waters with silver, and the reflections of city and crimson dock lights touch them with gold and green and red. The music of a thousand thousand lights.

Why do I live in Tacoma, again? Bah.