Kites

I've always had a love affair with kites.  Or maybe it was the idea of kites.  Thinking I could loft one up in the air and then lay back on a grassy knoll and just watch it soar and float above me in a blue sky.

Or perhaps it is because my first experience of kite flying was with my sister Sarah down at our house on Cooks Road in the jenny pasture.  (Jenny was a female donkey - hence her name - that my Daddy had bought to plow his garden)  I was somewhere between 7 and 10.  Sarah showed up with a kite.  And out in the pasture we went.  She would run and laugh and smile.  I'd run and romp.  We got our kite up and it'd stay for awhile, but then the stubborn Texas breeze would die down to nothing and the kite would crash.  Then we'd start all over again.  And that was the essence of my memories of Sarah....laughter, smiles and a childlike love of anything that seemed simple and fun. 

I tried my best to pass that experience on to both of you as you came along and entered that age.  But nowhere that we ever lived had such a wide open space without trees or power and phone lines.  So our actual kite flying was less successful.  I just hope that the love and the smiles and the laughter got handed down.