Some of the people you love, you only get in doses, and that doesn’t make the love any smaller. My uncle and his family lived out of state my whole childhood, so I knew them about a week out of every year, in visits, in concentrated bursts of family that had to last until the next time. My uncle was a teacher and then a principal, and I respected him enormously, the kind of man whose steadiness you could feel in a room. And even at that distance, even in doses, they were mine, part of the fabric of who I came from.

When I was thirteen, I flew by myself to visit them in Idaho. Just me, a kid on a plane, crossing states on my own to go be with family for a while. I still think about that trip, about being that young and that independent, about how much it meant that there were people at the other end of the flight worth going all that way for.

And here is the thing that gets me, the small perfect symmetry of it. The last time I was on an airplane, all these years later, was to fly to my cousin’s wedding in Washington. My cousin is five years younger than me and a genuinely good person, one of the easy ones to love, and there I was decades after that solo flight to Idaho, boarding a plane once again to go be with the same branch of family.

First solo flight of my young life and the most recent flight of my grown one, both of them to the same people. That says something, I think, about who stays woven into you even when the miles and the years keep you apart. I don’t see them much anymore. Life does that, spreads everyone out, thins the visits down to almost nothing. But I hold them warmly, all of them, across all that distance. Some family you get in big daily doses and some you get in small rare ones, and I’ve come to believe the rare ones count just as much. They were always worth the flight.