Go Fly a Kite

On beautiful, spring days we would excitedly run outside because we could fly our kites. We would all meet in the back yard with our brand new kites and we each had our own techniques for getting our kites up. The kids who ran with them never did figure out that they could run all day and the kite was not going to stay up once they ran out of running room.

Once somebody did manage to get their kite up. Everybody would crowd around begging for a turn to fly the kite. When we were lucky the kite would get high enough to need another roll of string or two. We always shared. That was the rules. The greatest day ever was the time we got a kite up 10 rolls of string high. It was so high it looked like a dot in the sky and we were sure that the planes overhead were going to hit it.(impossible of course)

We all had to pool our change to go buy more string several times. (the store was next door) When we ran out of money we had to hit the ditch beside the store to collect bottles to return. If our parents would have caught us we would have been dead because the ditch was nothing but a mess of broken glass and trash. We didn't care because we knew that all the pop bottles were not broken and on good day there would be enough bottles to pay for string or pop or candy or whatever the emergency of the day was.

Anyway we flew that kite until it was so dark that we couldn't see it any more and we had to pull it down. We often tried to duplicate our success but we never did even come close again. By the way Rusty was the one flying the kite that day.