I like contrails. Taking walks on clear summer days, when the heavens are deep blue, I love to tip my head back and watch aircraft passing overhead, leaving their long, white traces against the blue expanse. Someone, a pilot, explained to me that it was exhaust, up there so high that it freezes. The exhaust looks like clean, billowing cotton collecting behind the plane. I wonder how many miles of trail I’m seeing, wondering whether my distance from the plane is deceiving my eyes, that a space I could frame with my fingers is actually far longer than it looks from the ground.

I love planes. I like how sometimes you hear their hum before you see them. Their sound is not logical. Then you crane your neck and finally, you spot the tiny machine far off in the sky. It may be toward evening, the sun glinting off the metal. I think about how that craft is full of orderly rows of people, way up there, seats bolted to the floor, who are at this instant talking, reading, watching movies. The plane’s metal belly separates their feet from great heights beneath them and the wooded landscape below where a pair of eyes might be watching their progress.