Wednesday's Words on a Frid...oops, Saturday

On Wednesdays, Delores, from A Feathered Nest has a meme which she calls Words for Wednesday.

She puts up a selection of six words which we then use in a short story, if we are able.

Sometimes I look at her words and nothing at all comes to mind.

This week's words are:

1. flight

2. tropical

3. balanced

4. sunstroke

5. despair

6. slime

Here is my short story:

Molly Raven sat in the small, cold waiting room of the little airport, copies of Alaska Magazine and a cup of coffee balanced on the seat beside her.  

 After all these years, her son was coming home. At Nineteen, an overjoyed Jimmy Raven had been chosen to go along on a field trip. A Training Dig they'd called it.

The crew had flown out of Anchorage Airport on their way to their tropical jungle destination thirteen years ago. They were supposed to have been gone for one year.

 But after six months of site practise, they'd actually found something and the field trip had become a bona fide, fully funded expedition. Museums had gotten involved, there were historically significant findings, government grants.....Jimmy's letters had been filled with the excitement of being included in something so big.

There'd been occasional bad news too, like the time Rob, a team leader, had fallen victim to sunstroke and had to be driven out in a rickety old jeep, to recover in the hospital of the nearest town.

And the despair they'd felt that time one of their water sources had inexplicably dried up, leaving only small pools of bug infested slime in place of the once babbling stream. 

Now they were all coming home again. The flight was coming in and Molly moved to the window to watch as the little plane landed and passengers disembarked.

And there he was!

At thirty-two, Jimmy was no longer the boy she'd waved off in 1999, but she knew the man striding across the tarmac was him. There was no mistaking that waterfall length of glossy blue-black hair. 

Molly's boy was home and safe.

Until the next expedition.