Moultrie

The big day arrives. Daffodils, tulips and chrome-yellow forsythia signal a weather change. Spring breezes tame winter winds.

No weather calendar announces the opening day of kite flying. A kite-savvy kid senses when it’s time to assemble his kite. Still too cool for him to go barefoot outdoors, the kid slips into tattered tennis shoes and tugs on a worn sweatshirt which by afternoon lies in a heap across a tree stump in the sun-warmed, kite-flying field.

Besides the enjoyment of watching kids fly kites in area neighborhoods, I’ve spotted kite-flying enthusiasts on my VLB (very low budget) travels. At Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, a gentleman wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase paused to send a silk kite into the air.

In Mexico at a shantytown, a lad with a homemade kite raced across mowed fields to keep his kite soaring.

Even the film entertainment business gets into the act. In “Mary Poppins,” the repentant father, Mr. Banks, leads his children to a kite-flying park as he sings, “Let’s go fly a kite …”

As kids, my brothers and I treated kite-flying like a major holiday. Unfortunately, schoolteachers didn’t. Painful times when kite-friendly breezes whisper at the classroom window to come join them.

A choice of kite styles. A news article listed items one could make into a kite, including an empty pizza box. That seemed more like flying garbage than a kite. Our family kite choices: diamond-shaped, cheap paper ones with gaudy colors of storybook heroes. The wooden frame easily snapped if not assembled with care. Kite string — strong and lots of it.

A tail made of thin strips of rags kept the kite from whipping around and nosediving into the dirt. In the afternoon, if a breeze turned into wind gusts, my brothers and I added more rag strips. We were like aeronautical engineers, calculating lift and drag with worn shirts and outgrown, faded school dresses.

With an assembled kite in hand, the first decision — where to fly the kite?

Around power lines? The biggest, “No! No!”

Next, avoid trees. Charlie Brown, the boy in the “Peanuts” comic strip, attests to that. Trees are to kites as dogs are to roast beef sitting unguarded on the kitchen table.

If kite flying became an Olympic event, we enjoyed the perfect venue. No trees nearby, no power lines. An open field within walking distance from home, and boasting a hill that sloped towards the Columbia River. With kites in hand, we hiked to the bottom of the hill, ran like crazy up the slope, catching the wind. By the time we reached the hilltop, our kites soared overhead.

Controlling a high-flying kite — a feeling of exuberance and achievement.

Later Dad showed up. “Supper is ready,” he said.

My brothers pulled in their kites.

The vertical flight of my kite went into a horizontal pattern stretching from hilltop to the bottom of the slope.

“I’m coming in a minute,” I said. “Go on ahead.”

I wound the kite string onto a round piece of wood — faster than winding string onto the ball the string came on. Still, that was tedious. Faster to go hand-over-hand, pull in the kite string onto the ground like hand-over-hand climbing exercises on a rope in the school gym. Faster, but resulted in a tangled mass of knots on the ground, looking like the tangled knots of fishing line I’d seen in some fishermen’s tackle boxes.

As the sun dipped lower, the knot ball grew larger until I landed the kite. I gathered the bundle of knots and headed home, the rag-bag tail dragging through the weeds.