Yesterday morning I wrote about watching the sun scramble up over the pines along Redwine Road.

This morning I watched that very same sun come up over Johnson County, Kansas.

Earlier this afternoon, somewhere high over the middle of America on my way home from a quick trip to Kansas City, I found myself still thinking about sunrises.

Or, more specifically, about chasing one. Well, not really even that – it was really about pacing the sunrise.

Kansas has a lot of sky. That was one of the things that struck me this morning. Maybe it is because the land is flatter than home, or perhaps there just seemed to be fewer pines, hills, houses and power lines crowding the view of the horizon, pushing that horizon a little further out. Whatever the reason, riding north on I-435 looking out across that wide-open country gave the morning sky a much bigger canvas on which to work. And it was beautiful.

Which naturally got me wondering: How fast would you actually have to travel to chase the sun?

Could you fly west fast enough that the sun simply stayed there on the horizon – caught forever in that little sliver of time between darkness and daylight – and you have a never-ending sunrise  dancing across the constantly changing clouds in your rear-view mirror.

Now, I am an engineer, after all, not an English major like both of my parents, so this is where a perfectly good poetic thought naturally begins to deteriorate into a math problem.

And that’s a story for another day…but I did a little bit of homework this evening.

At roughly the latitude of Kansas City, I think you would need to travel west at something like 800+ miles per hour to keep pace with the Earth’s rotation and hold the sunrise more or less stagnant on the horizon.

So that airplane wasn’t quite fast enough to stop a sunrise.

But that thought naturally led me to someone in the family who has gone considerably faster, someone that I got to hug and hold mourn with on Monday this week.

My cousin Joe Edwards – Joe Boy to us – spent much of his career flying fighter jets before our government decided that apparently wasn’t fast enough and sent him to NASA where they strapped him to the Space Shuttle.

In January 1998, Joe was the pilot of Endeavour on STS-89. I’m sure that Momma has mentioned him before here, we all have heard story after story about our Astronaut Cousin, Joe Boy.

I had remembered that mission as going to the International Space Station (that’s what I tell people about when I share my version of his career, anyway), but in one of those little historical corrections that makes me realize 1998 was much longer ago than I care to admit, the International Space Station wasn’t there yet. Joe and the crew of Endeavour went to the Russian space station Mir. The first piece of the ISS wouldn’t launch until later that same year.

And while he was on that grand adventure, Joe Boy was really moving. Endeavour traveled some 3.6 million miles and circled the Earth 139 times during that mission. At orbital speeds of close to 18,000MPH, astronauts experience around sixteen sunrises and sunsets every twenty-four hours. That’s…a lot. Sixteen. In one day. Imagine that.

Here I was thinking about a single sunrise over Kansas in all my spare time today (haha, that’s a joke and if you know, you know…), and Joe had days when the sun couldn’t seem to make up its mind whether it was coming or going.

Without doing any more math today to verify this, he clearly travelled fast enough to pace the sunrise. Next time I see him, I need to bring this up – perhaps he has a ready answer?

But let’s get back to Kansas.

Momma traveled out this way once with some of her college friends. They went all the way up to the Dakotas and saw Mount Rushmore, and as I looked across all that open country this morning, I found myself wondering whether she ever watched the sun rise out there.

Maybe she did. I hope she did.

Ashley and the kids and I saw some extraordinary places ourselves earlier this summer in Europe – places where I would stop occasionally and simply look around and think about how impossibly large and beautiful this world is.

Different countries. Different languages. Different landscapes. Different mornings. Same sun.

The same sun that came up over Kansas this morning had risen over Barcelona while most of us were still asleep. It would eventually make its way to Georgia, crest those pine trees on Redwine Road, then cross Wehadkee Creek and Randolph County, and then somewhere out west it would disappear beneath another horizon while somebody else stopped what they were doing just long enough to admire the colors as the sun spread its watercolor brush across the clouds at sunset in the desert sky over Arizona or New Mexico.

Of course, I realize the engineer in me needs to point out that the sun isn’t actually making its way anywhere. This fragile earth, our island home, is doing the (relative) moving as we spin around beneath it. Astrophysics is so fascinating…

But somehow that makes the whole thing even more marvelous.

And speaking of marvelous things in Kansas, this particular morning also included breakfast at a restaurant called The Big Biscuit.

Momma and Daddy would have both loved that name.

I was mildly disappointed when I discovered that The Big Biscuit is a chain, because “The Big Biscuit” sounds like exactly the kind of wonderful little locally owned place that ought to have one location with somebody’s grandmother kneading the biscuit dough in the back, that also serves midwest covered casserole dishes and poutine for supper.

Even more troubling, not one of my colleagues actually ordered a biscuit.

I’m still trying to determine why we bothered going – but it has become a tradition with them to stop at this particular restaurant on these trips, so there we were.

The pancakes, however, were approximately the diameter of small hubcaps, and I don’t believe anyone at the table managed to finish their breakfast. I fully expect several of my traveling companions dozed off in food comas and dreaming about their Big Biscuit morning feast on our return flight.

And as it turned out, I had another traveling companion on this flight.

A little girl named Rosie.

I only know her name because her sweet momma said it quite a few times from a few rows back.

“Rosie – hush!”

Apparently Rosie had a lot to say today.

She looks to be about two years old, and from what I could hear she had opinions about being up in the air, about going back to Kansas, about leaving Kansas, and about most everything else a two-year-old can find worth discussing at considerable volume.

And every time I heard her momma say, “Rosie – hush,” I couldn’t help but grin and think about my little sister.

I wonder how many times our Rosie (Tootie) was told to hush.

Probably plenty.

I can almost hear Gran – my grandmother Rosalyn McMurray, Momma’s mother – saying it to her.

“Hush, Rosie.”

I am less certain I can hear Momma saying it. Maybe she did.

Perhaps hers was more of a “Tootie, hush up.”

That a little more familiar ring to it.

But this little Rosie on the airplane seemed to have some of the same spunk my little sister had, and for a few minutes today, somewhere around 30,000 feet between Kansas City and Atlanta, I listened to a two-year-old chatter away and remembered another little girl named Rosie who left us far too soon.

Funny how that happens.

You go looking out the window for the sun, and somehow the people you love keep finding their way into the view.

Meanwhile, there I sat looking out the airplane window as we flew steadily east back home – effectively time traveling into the sun, jumping time zones like you step over a crack in the sidewalk.

And still I was thinking about chasing it. But maybe that’s the wrong idea. Maybe we’re not supposed to catch the sunrise.

I think the beauty of a sunrise comes in some degree from the fact that we can’t ever really catch it, bottle it up, or hold onto it.

For just a few minutes every morning, as light creeps over the horizon and everything changes. The sky takes on colors that weren’t there moments before, clouds light up from underneath, shadows begin to retreat, you watch the colors change right before your eyes, and then – almost before you’ve had the chance to process and properly appreciated what you’re seeing – morning has arrived and that fleeting moment is gone.

Yesterday morning, I caught one of those moments over Fayette County and instinctively wanted to send it to Momma.

This morning I caught another one, hundreds of miles away in Kansas, and I sent it to my family on our group text thread, but only after one of my beloved cousins shared the sunset from her back porch this evening back in Randolph County.

And this afternoon, somewhere between there and home, a little girl named Rosie reminded me that sometimes the people we miss show up in unexpected places too.

Tomorrow morning there will be another sunrise. Same sun. Different horizon for me. Another new beginning.

Perhaps the trick isn’t figuring out how fast we would have to travel to pace that sunrise and pretend we can make it last forever…perhaps the trick is simply forcing ourselves to stop long enough to notice it while it’s happening.