Guy Smalley illustration • smmalleyart.com
Now that Summer is here, it’s easier to reflect a bit more kindly on treasonous Spring. From right after New Year until Mother’s Day, I bristle in a crystalline funk, softened momentarily by a couple of exciting events such as my sister’s birthday and the deadline for the corporate tax extension.
The crispness of late Autumn too quickly dissipates in the Winter exhaustion of putting on and taking off heavy coats. I become sore from, and at, the carrying of damp firewood. Despair settles in from the lack of fresh greens, and I grow sick of soup and mud and boots.
As a child, however, Spring brought the winds, which meant The Flying of Kites.
My belief is that truth and fact, while occasionally related, are not the same. Memory is a curious blend of them. Like snowflakes and fingerprints, no two memories are identical. All of them are true.
In my memory, the first Saturday of March was second only to my birthday in importance, beating even Christmas. It blew howling winds to our home and me to my parents’ bedroom door, which had been locked to me far too long for my taste, not nearly long enough for theirs. “Daddy! Wake up! It’s time to fly kites!” An hour of that, then an interminable breakfast of pancakes and sausage. Mom loaded the dishwasher herself, to get us out of her house before we drove her mad with fidgeting and whining. Coats and shoes for me and sister, (a waste of time in our opinion,) then to the shed for the kites.
They were red, white, and blue, geometric designs. Paper, wood and string. Mom tore old sheets into strips for the tails, the same thing she used to roll our unruly curls after bathtime.
Truth: Every year, we carefully dismantled the kites, rolled and banded the paper, took apart the wooden spines, unknotted and rolled the string on the reels, and placed all on a dry shelf.
Fact: We played with them too roughly, long after our father had lost interest, and mid-April, a tangled mass of various fibers was shoved carelessly into a corner of the shed to be stepped on and cobwebbed for a year.
After surveying the damage, there was a trip to the dime store for replacement parts, or even new kites, untangling and rewinding string, and then it was lunchtime at our grandmother’s. Mom wasn’t letting us back in until we were worn out.
We lived in double-wides, government housing, near the Oconaluftee Job Corps Center, where my dad taught, just inside the Great Smokies, and just north of Cherokee, where throngs of visitors would soon clog the Parkway, bringing mountains of money and challenges. It wasn’t glamorous: we thought the Park Ranger quarters nearby were fancy with their peaked roofs and windows without cranks.
No matter, we had ample garden space, with radish seeds and onion sets already in the ground, and a wide-open hayfield, with minimal power lines, for flying those beautiful kites.
Fact: Someone always got a kite caught in the lines. If the wind didn’t bring it down, it stayed until it disintegrated. At least once a season, one of us got caught up in the soaring ecstasy of watching the almost-weightless paper diamonds traveling further and further away from us, dipping gracefully and rising again, even higher, and the string we had again forgotten to tie off on the reel would suddenly disappear. The tension in our arms abruptly gone, we would almost fall backwards. A moment of stunned silence, then we ran, ran after it in our heavy coats, trying to catch the uncatchable, laughing the whole time, breathless before we got to the treeline where the poor kite hung, impaled on a branch. If we were lucky! Losing a kite meant sharing. Sharing was boring, and never ended well.
Truth: Glorious Summer heat was just ahead, and school would let out soon. The days would melt together, cooled by Popsicles and my grandmother’s lawn sprinkler, and I loved those days best. The kites pulled me through. They were happy times, some of the happiest of my childhood, spent with my dad and sister. Learning how to repair and properly care for things, how to harness the power of the wind, how physics plus muscle memory make all things possible, how to get out of our heads for a few precious moments. How to (almost) fly ourselves.