Boston ? Jill Carroll spent much of her seven-hour flight home Sunday staring at the blue sky, every moment a little farther away from the hiding places where her terrorizing former captors denied her even sunlight.

“Talk about freedom: Here we are right above the clouds, we’re in the sky – when I was so far away from it. It’s wonderful,” the Christian Science Monitor reporter told the paper.

A few times, she held up and admired a red rose, a gift left on her in-flight dinner tray. But she could not have savored her new freedom any more sweetly than after her plane touched down, when she wrapped her arms around her tearful mother, father and twin sister.

The 28-year-old journalist, held hostage in Iraq for 82 days, arrived at Boston’s Logan International Airport three days after her release. She was quickly driven in a police-escorted limousine to a private meeting with her family at the newspaper’s headquarters.

“I finally feel like I am alive again. I feel so good,” Carroll told the Monitor. “To be able to step outside anytime, to feel the sun directly on your face – to see the whole sky. These are luxuries that we just don’t appreciate every day.”

Carroll was freelancing for the Monitor when she was seized Jan. 7 in one of Baghdad’s most dangerous neighborhoods, near where a Sunni Arab official had agreed to meet her for an interview that never took place. The gunmen who abducted her killed her Iraqi translator.

Carroll has said her kidnappers confined her to a small, soundproof room with frosted, opaque windows and repeatedly threatened her.

Carroll didn’t step into public view Sunday but reports and photos through the Monitor’s Web site described her flight back and her reunion with her family. Monitor colleagues accompanied her on the commercial flight from Frankfurt, Germany; a military plane was used for the first leg of her trip home.

Photographs of the reunion showed Carroll’s sister stroking her hair, her father casting eyes upward as he holds her tightly, her mother staring intently into her face.

Editor Richard Bergenheim said colleagues were grateful Carroll was home safe.

Former hostage Jill Carroll, left, is hugged by her mother Mary Beth Carroll as her twin sister Katie pats her head and her father Jim smiles, right, in Boston, Sunday, April 2, 2006. Carroll, the U.S. journalist held hostage for 82 days in Iraq, returned to the United States aboard a commercial flight to Boston earlier Sunday.

“When Jill is ready, the Monitor will begin to tell her story and we will also hold a press conference where she will speak. But we will not be making any further statements on Sunday and hope that the Carroll family’s privacy will be respected,” Bergenheim said in a statement.

On her flight, Carroll was touched to find the rose left for her. Later, a flight attendant dropped off a copy of Friday’s USA Today in which she saw her own face framed by a black head scarf. It was a photo of the giant poster that had been erected in Rome.

She was tickled to see pictures of her family and kissed the photo of her father, Jim Carroll. “He looks good,” she said, and ran her fingers over the photo of her mom, Mary Beth, the Monitor reported.

Carroll, who has studied Arabic, attracted a huge amount of sympathy during her ordeal, and a variety of groups in the Middle East, including the Islamic militant group Hamas, appealed for her release.

The kidnappers, calling themselves the Revenge Brigades, had demanded the release of all female detainees in Iraq by Feb. 26 or Carroll would be killed. U.S. officials did release some female detainees at the time, but said it had nothing to do with the demands.

The Michigan native graduated in 1999 from the University of Massachusetts with a degree in journalism. She was freelancing for the Monitor when she was kidnapped, and was hired about a week later.