I picked up Steven at the Charlottetown airport last week. The Air Canada flight from Toronto was late. It had been deiced twice at Pearson. When it finally took off, I started my 100 km drive over snow-drifted highways, and the plane touched down just a couple of minutes after I got there.

I haven’t been in the terminal since before the pandemic. They’ve done a bit of renovating, removed the Cows Ice Cream cow that used to greet travellers in the arrivals area. A much more multicultural array of folks were waiting with me than in the past

Two children tried to find a place to hide so they could surprise the person they were meeting. A young man held a bouquet of flowers, shifting back and forth and looking at the floor, thinking hard. A Buddhist monk in orange robes and the biggest snow boots I have ever seen came in decked out in a couple of DSLR cameras. There were the pasty potato-faced people like me. 

I was sitting on a bench far enough away that I couldn’t see the when the doors opened, but I knew a couple of seconds before they did because those waiting near the doors suddenly started to crane their necks to spot the person they were meeting. There are no jet bridges at Charlottetown, so people have to make their way across the tarmac through whatever weather awaits, emerging from the darkness at night.

The passengers trickled in at first, and then suddenly they burst forth, a flock of black four-wheeled suitcases with long handles, twirling and pirouetting across the bumpy tiles, click click click, a ballet of surcharge-dodging swans. Their human handlers seemed to have the most gentle of grips on them, just a couple of fingers, and that let them deftly maneuver around the people hugging babies and kissing grandmothers and out to waiting conveyances.

A few people carried those bags too tired to swivel or were reluctant to bump over the snow from the plane. A couple of my hens don’t like walking on fresh snow and will insist on being carried when they tire of the uncertainty of the puffy white, so I expect the bag owners faced the same thing.

In just a couple of minutes, the clattering cases were gone. The children were hugging a tall man, the youngest clinging to his leg so he sort of dragged her around, everyone laughing. I lost sight of the man with the flowers, so don’t know if the person he was meeting arrived. The monk was talking to a family with a young boy, no photos being taken yet. Steven grabbed his backpack off the conveyor belt and we stepped out into the drifting snow.