Omaha, October 2009

As my plane descended on its approach to the Omaha airport, it flew over an emerald baseball diamond completely surrounded by farmlands brown after the harvest but still showing their even furrows following the contours of the land.

Reflecting its surroundings, Omaha is an orderly place with clean, wide streets: no random storefronts among the tall office buildings, no irregular jutting in the architecture, no meandering streets. Everything is rectangular and spotless.

The occasion was my niece Julie’s wedding, a stylish celebration in orange and cream that spotlighted the creative genius and profound love the couple shares. On the door of the reception venue, a dance club, a sign said, “Closed for a private event.” What fun to be among the invited instead of the disappointed. We Kush sisters comprised the old generation, the gaggle of aunts at the elders’ table.

Three of us yukked it up in the hotel elevator after the party and told another passenger that we were sisters.

“Who’s the youngest?” he asked.

We froze.

That would be Betty. We had last gathered in Omaha four years ago for her funeral.

But in a flash, we recovered the festive mood and replied with good humor.

I’d opted to return to Boston at the crack of dawn Monday, and by mid-afternoon Sunday, the rest of the family had gone. Alone in a hotel in the heartland, I felt like the last person on the planet.

I wandered the streets of “NoDo,” the up-and-coming neighborhood north of downtown. I saw signs of an artsy community on the verge of bursting out: the Tip-Top Apartments in a rehabbed, 90-year-old factory; a sculptor’s studio in a low, orange-painted building, the lawn and driveway covered with metal creations. The place was deserted; no sensible person walks around downtown on Sunday evening.

At a squeaky-clean bar in the Tip-Top, I drank a Tall Grass beer brewed in Kansas and watched football while waiting for a to-go sandwich.

I was a long way from Boston, but even farther from the Midwest I knew when the nine Kush kids lived in Lake Zurich, Illinois, more than 50 years ago. We were together in that house for only a few years between Betty’s birth and Jackie moving out for college, but the experience still defines a part of each of us. We ended up in nine different states. Betty landed in Nebraska when our parents moved there, and she stayed.

Although Julie and Jason reestablished the Kush connection to Omaha after Betty’s children moved away, I sipped my beer and doubted I’d ever return. I had a strong feeling that at first felt like sadness, but before my sandwich arrived, I knew it was something else, an intimate awareness of the passage of time.