Downwinded

Sitting, knee up – because comfort and coolness waft up my skirt – watching airplanes collect the rust and the dust of tie down. Windsock gently inflated, runway stays straight. It’s a life=giving line of pavement. Here my mind wanders daily. So the week end’s indulgence is a reward I’ve sought and now enjoy. The thing that can cause so much stress is the thing that provides serious freedom.

This place could be such a gem.

Take me with you.

I want my kids to have a flyer's life.

Held up by atmospheric pressure, horsepower and your own pilotage, it’s so far from miraculous. Nevertheless. So much of it sponsors your every adrenaline-seeking fiber, absorbs your mind’s musings, subscribing them to purpose, system, routine and ensured accomplishment if you follow the process with a dose of finesse and a dash of natural talent.

It pulls you back up for endless amounts of more. 

As with any art, it’s unconquerable and improvement is an exponential goal. And in keeping with the artful characteristic, it grants you a sort of healing. It’s a reorientation of our grounded, heavy, earth-laden perspectives, and expands your every faculty. It attaches steel flaps to your brazen little arms; gives your toes directional control; and your heart – your core – synchronizes to the rhythm of that twirling blade up front. Fuselage links with belly, if you will, and that bobbly thing in your brain that tells you when you’re directionally whopperjawed bounces with every gyro on the bird’s display panel.

The machine is everything you are but allows for so much more. So here I sit, like taking nutmeg for a heroine addiction, looking through my car's windshield at those roped, imprisoned impossibilities, watching others enjoy their version of my hobby. Slave, a grateful, master-abiding one though, to a 100-year-old privilege called flight. 

And this, my aviator's lament.