More thoughts on talking to a Paraglider from NY

The dreams were free at night.  I'd launch my 5 year old body(?) off gray shingles that left silvers in my bottom when I'd slide myself down the roof.  Below the peak of the barn roof was a haystack half as tall as the peak.  I'd soar off that roof and try to touch the clouds.  I would do swirls, twirls, somersaults and cartwheel through the air.  It was easy, and it was freeing.  I remember feeling the pure joy of flying, not in the black night of dreams but in the cerulean blue of hot Kansas skies.

The dreams were so real to me I actually thought I did fly at night while I was sleeping.  The dreams occurred with regularity and became something I always looked forward to at night.  I was never scared, and I never fell to the ground.

I don't remember how old I was when the dreams stopped.  Life just kind of got in the way and anchored me to the earth.  Daddy got sick.  We moved off the farm to Lincoln, KS.  Daddy died.  We moved to Salina, KS.  With each year the chains of gravity kept me grounded, and I forgot all about the dreams of flying.

It wasn't until after I was married and started having children that an aunt of Pat's talked to me about her dreams of flying.  Estelle, also had dreams of flying when she was young in Iowa.  We compared stories, and once again I remembered the thrill of soaring through the air and the wonder of the earth below.

I often wonder what those dreams symbolized for me.  Estell really believed she flew.  Did I?  It was so real and so natural in my dreams.  It was a time in my life where sorrow had not touched me.

This year I attended a dinner for the paragliders racing in the Woodrat Paragliding race at Fiasco Winery in Ruch.  Sitting next to me was a man from New York who had flown Paragliders all over the world.  He encouraged me to try a tandem flight.  I mentioned to him my dreams of flight as a child.  He told me that people who have those dreams usually wind up paragliding.

HUMMMM.

That got me to thinking. I thought of flying.  I thought of the symbolism ripe in the act of flying with a paraglider.  I thought of turkey vultures and how they use the thermals to kettle.  I wondered how paragliders got from Woodrat to Grants Pass and back again.  I was intrigued by the whole idea of comparing and contrasting my childhood flights with the act of paragliding  today.

I tried my hand at a sonnet because I've also been thinking about William Wordsworth.  I combined my thoughts of flying with the craft of writing a sonnet.  Sonnets are HARD work!  It's like Sudoku for my brain!  I'm not too fond of my results, but I like the difficulty and challenge of writing in iambic pentameter and rhyming.

I'm currently working on a free verse with the same theme.  Maybe someday I will take the venture and do a tandem paragliding ride.  I think I should in honor of that happy, free spirit of a child I was back on the barn roof, launching my body skyward!