Early Morning Flights

The Early Flight Is a Given

Flying out of Silverton to head back east always means one thing:
the early morning flight.

Six a.m. or seven a.m. departure. It’s a given.

Which means a 3:30 or 4:00 a.m. wake-up call, followed by an hour-and-a-half drive to the airport. Thankfully, both Montrose and Durango are small enough that arriving an hour before takeoff is still reasonable, and somehow, it always works.

It’s just one of those things. Living in the West and flying back East.

There are later flights, of course. But as we’ve learned over the years, later flights come with higher odds of something going wrong—missed connections, weather delays, a domino effect that turns a simple trip into a long, exhausting ordeal. And even when everything goes right, landing after 10 p.m. means my sweet mama driving in the dark, which she hates. So really, the early flight is the least bad option for everyone involved.

So we suck it up.

We sleep lightly the night before, half-dreaming that we’ve missed our alarm. We pull ourselves out of bed while it’s still dark, load kids in pajamas into the car, and point the headlights toward the airport.

This trip, though, I’m flying solo.

I’m heading back to North Carolina to visit family—and to do some leadership work with a summer camp that is deeply near and dear to my heart. Steve woke up with me, made me a cup of coffee while I got dressed, and turned on the truck so it could start warming up. I still wished I’d worn gloves—my hands cold on the steering wheel as I pulled away.

I’m grateful for this time.
Time alone.
Time with people I love.

As I drove over the passes with the full moon still hanging in the sky, I wanted something familiar, something to keep me company. I don’t know where the thought came from, but I knew immediately: I needed to listen to the Chicks.

Wide Open Spaces, Before Sunrise

I pulled up their greatest hits, and suddenly my senior year of high school came rushing back. Words I hadn’t thought about in years spilled out of me without effort. Melodies made my heart flutter. Stories made me cry—that poor soldier, the letters, the bow. I got lost in men like Earl who think it’s okay to beat a woman because they believe she belongs to them, and thanked God for friends like Maryanne—the ride-or-die who shows up when it matters.

I remembered falling in love with a boy who sang Cowboy Take Me Away to me.
And healing from that heartbreak by realizing I needed wide open spaces, the West, to make my mistakes and grow up.

I hate driving in the dark because of oncoming headlights, but that morning I might have passed ten cars over the entire hour-and-a-half drive. It was just me, my truck, my nostalgia-soaked playlist, and the moonlight glistening off the mountains.

Coming Home Looks Different Now

Coming home has meant many things over my twenty years living out West.

Yes—time with family and friends, never enough of it.
Yes—favorite places like Flat Rock Bakery, familiar hikes at Carl Sandburg.

But more and more, coming home also means growing up.

It means preparing.

It means staying in my adult self instead of slipping back into the child we sometimes become around our parents. It means asking the harder questions now—the ones that feel uncomfortable but necessary.

Where are your important papers?
Can I help you go through storage?
What do you want things to look like down the road?

These aren’t easy conversations. But they feel like acts of love—quiet, practical, forward-looking love. The kind you hope you won’t regret not having later.

So maybe that early morning flight is about more than logistics. Maybe it’s about arriving with enough margin, enough clarity, to show up fully. To hold memory and responsibility at the same time. To honor where you came from while standing firmly in who you are now.

This is a start.

Final thought, gentle reminder

And now, while I’m home, without kids in tow, I’ll laugh at myself flipping through old yearbooks and photos late at night. Looking back at a life I’ve lived, and forward at the one still unfolding, I feel deeply lucky to be right here.