Homesick

The four were strangely alike in appearance, nearly the same age, the age where gray hairs finally outnumber black or baldness takes over. The age when the expanding waistline has begun to sag tiredly when robust middle age begins the slow accelerating decline toward senility. A strange group to find aboard a spaceship, but then The Columbus was a very strange ship. Bolted to its outer hull, just under the viewports were wooden boxes full of red geraniums and ivy wound tenuous green fronds over the gleaming hull that had withstood the bombardment of pinpoint meteors and turned away the deadly power of naked cosmic rays.