Landing

The high pitched whine of my washer’s spin cycle. Descending, as though a plane coming in for landing – then taxiing quietly along the tarmac towards the terminals. In this gentle, rumbling lull, Mr Airplane Man’s album Moanin starts up. The occasional slosh from my washer in the gaps between songs. I pause to answer an email from a friend. The sun shapes angular patterns on my grass. I realise that the white wall is not consistently white – that all sorts of shadows and fields of intensity play across its surface. The blue wall is harder to differentiate. There is a dark upper section – a kind of stratosphere and a more yellow, middle level troposphere, but none of this associates the blue wall definitely with the sky. If anything, I associate it with the depths of the ocean. Recently a large passenger jet – MH370 – disappeared from the sky and descended into the sea. Or at least this is the assumption. No traces of it have been found.