A Joy I Never Knew

It's spring. The snow is all gone. The ground is mostly dry. It's windy and cool. Do you know what that means? Kites.

Kites used to be a big thing when I was young. Not every year, but on years when people were interested it seemed like everyone was interested. I remember Old Man Smith's young adult son, who helped him manage the farm (crops, no animals), flew a giant box kite. He had it staked out in their hay field with about a quarter mile of string. The kite flew over our back field for days and days and days. It amazed me how it could stay up there without any help.

Eventually, it did come down. The wind made a small tear which got increasingly larger until the kite came crashing down. I found it in our field by means of following the string trail. I brought it back to Bob, who took one look at it and declared it done. I could have it. Cool! Of course, I never got it to fly again. But that was not unusual for me. You see, I couldn't get kites to fly.

Unlike Charlie Brown, who's kites always seemed to find the nearest tree, my kites were not so magnetically attracted to wood. Dirt seemed to be their fascination. They would nose dive right down and lay flat, a humiliating monument to my ineptitude.

I remember holding onto a stick at one end of a string when I was five. Nearly a mile away a kite flew. It wasn't there because of me, though. Mickey had got it into the air and then had me told onto it while he went and got more string. He kept getting more and more and more. It got harder and harder and harder to hold, and I had this magical sense that I was about to go flying myself. (It never happened. Pity. It might have been fun. After I wet my pants for fear.)

The string eventually broke and that kite wound up destroyed in a tree. But I could never make my own fly. Not once.

I could make them. The little pieces of balsa wood acting as a frame. Looping the string through the holes in the paper. Tying on the tail. I got all of that done. But the kites would never fly for me. Not unless someone else got them going first.

One year Daddy purchased plastic kites. They were new that year, and guaranteed to fly. Everyone was out that day, standing in one of Old Man Smith's fields. He hadn't planted yet, so he didn't care. There must have been a dozen kites flying when Helvie and I arrived with Daddy, Mickey, and I think Judayl and Lynahr. Daddy helped Helvie get her kite up and she joined in the fun. I was supposed to be old enough to do it on my own. But I couldn't . It just wouldn't work. It didn't take long for the other kids to see my trouble, and soon I was being laughed at. But no one would help. Eventually, I was crying. That only made people laugh the more. So I took my kite and went home.

Two days later I was standing on the roof of The Old House, trying to get my kite to fly from there. It's pretty sad when the kite you're flying is lower than you are, but that's the way it went.

Kites are fun, though, aren't they?