Apr 18, 2012 4 min read

Our recent warm weather gets me in the mood to go fly a kite.

I don’t know if kids today still enjoy that annual spring pastime, but I recall what great anticipation we had as small fry for the first warm days following winter, days when the sun toasted the air rolling over the pastures turning the ether into a roiling breeze that would lift our tissue paper kites high.

Kite flying was an art. Building one wasn’t. Usually, we relied on the store-bought kits rather than attempting to build our own. I tried to make one from scratch, using tissue paper left over from some holiday wrapping and white glue only to have the paper tear before I could get he contraption into the air.

For some reason the kits just seemed more durable. And they were inexpensive.

But we were only allowed one each season. That meant as soon as our kite landed in a tree, wrapped its tail around a utility wire or crashed into a building, the season for flying was over.

Now, to fly a kite, one needs plenty of open space. For the uninitiated, you attach a lead of string from a ball of cotton twine to the center brace and run as fast as you can letting the air catch and lift the structure upward. There has to be some air current moving above you or it won’t work.

Oh, and the tail. You need a tail on the kite, or it will just beat itself to pieces once it hits the upper jet streams.

We made kite tails from old strips of cloth. They couldn’t be too heavy. And they couldn’t be too scant, or they wouldn’t stabilize the machine.

We lived on a dairy farm in my early years, which meant there were plenty of wide open spaces — pastures — through which to run in order to catch a breeze to lift the kite skyward. These fields were ideal. They were generally flat, devoid of trees or telephone poles (a kite’s mortal enemy) and, if you timed it right, the cows would be in the barn being milked. Nothing wrecks a kite flying session faster than turning to see a large bovine in your path.

The only drawback — and one that has probably become obvious to you already — was you had to keep one eye on the kite and the other on the ground. Why? Cow pies. No. I don’t mean those tasty confections that you buy at the supermarket. I mean the manure mines turning a barren landscape into something looking like it had a bad case of the pox.

Stepping in a pile of cow dung was anathema. Especially in a pair of tennis shoes. It took talent and coordination to be able to run at top speed, get the kite into the air and miss the scattered circles of poop in the path. Ah, but if you succeeded, you watched your kite dance, dip, turn and ply the upper air like a barnstormer.

Once you caught a good wind you could pilot you kite for what seemed like hours, pretending everything from conducting Franklin-ish experiments to make-believe dogfights with enemy planes.

Usually, I was just interested in seeing how high my kite could fly. I never got to the end of a ball of string. Either the kite would catch a bad current and crash to the ground or the tether would snap, freeing the paper bird, which would sail off higher and higher out of sight.

By that time, too, my shoes stunk, and I had had enough of stomping through cow chips.

I never was all that coordinated.

Now maybe I know why the old saying, “Oh, go fly a kite,” carries a negative meaning.

Have a good day.

James Pletcher Jr. is HeraldStandard.com business editor. He can be reached at 724-439-7571 or by email at jpletcher@heraldstandard.com.