Preparations for flight

On growing up in the suburbs of Kansas City

When I close my eyes, I see that yellow house and the concrete stairs rising from the driveway to a small landing at the front door, trimmed by the faux wrought iron railing so popular in working class suburbs in the 1970s. I hear the summer cicadas begin their midafternoon drone, feel the scratch of burnt grass on my perpetually bare feet.

It’s strange the memories a mind preserves while all else fades, bleached by time and worn smooth by experience. According to Freud, within each of us lies a primal scene—an event from childhood so indelibly imprinted in our psyche that it shapes the contours of our inner world and molds our sense of who we are.

I have two of these scenes. Woven together, they formed the way I think about movement, borders, freedom, and flight.

When I was seven and my brother was five and my sister nearly eleven, we all got bicycles for Christmas. My father taught me to ride on Oxford Drive, running behind me with one hand gripping the sissy bar of my banana seat. Until one day, he didn’t. I caught him out of the corner of my eye, standing still, many meters back. I’d left him behind.

Untethered and weightless, I imagined myself as Miss Almira Gulch, lifted from the ground by Dorothy’s tornado, still pedaling madly, spiraling upwards beyond reach of the world.

Photo by rahadian on Unsplash

My freedom was short-lived. No sooner had my siblings and I mastered the basics of the bicycle than we were confined to riding only in the driveway, circumscribed by our mother’s anxieties. Summer days were spent with the three of us, making 100 clockwise rotations around the driveway before pausing, tipping our bicycles onto their kickstands, and taking a drink of water from our plastic lunchbox thermoses. Then, we’d mount up again, turn our bicycles, and make another hundred circles in counter-clockwise direction.

Looking back, I see the three of us riding for hours in a ring like trained circus animals, and I wonder what our neighbors—those parents of children permitted to venture out into the world unsupervised for hours—thought of our spirographic daily rides.

While the movement of my childhood was a slow orbit, its taste was sun-warmed steel on my tongue.

Before my days were measured by revolutions around the driveway, before that Christmas I received my bicycle and learned to ride, summers were spent behind my house, in an expanse of crabgrass-riddled lawn, fenced by chainlink, which gave a satisfying rattle every time I shook it. Our home was bordered by neighbors on both sides, whose houses were nearly identical to ours. But behind our house and beyond our fence, there was a field where my siblings and I were forbidden to go. Snakes, my mother said.

Sitting at our property line one day, too hot to move, I stared through the fence and considered my options. A garden hose wound across the lawn, watering the single sapling my mother had planted as an investment in future shade. The Missouri sun beat down, transferring moisture from the earth to the air. Stubbly crabgrass pricked my naked thighs. Sweat slid down my spine, collecting in the elastic waistband of my shorts.

In a moment of childish curiosity birthed by boredom and lassitude, I stuck out my tongue and licked the chainlink fence.

Finding its steely grit not entirely unpleasant on the tongue, I closed my eyes and did it again. And again. Until, in the scant second between licks, boredom gave way to something unexpected. A grasshopper (ubiquitous in our drought-ridden neighborhood) landed on the chain link. And so, I licked a grasshopper. This was plenty startling in itself. But as the grasshopper unveiled its wings, I was stunned to discover that grasshoppers were not the land-bound creatures I’d always taken them to be, but rather—they could fly.

This one took to the skies like a tiny green miracle, flew over my neighbor’s yard, and disappeared beyond the forbidden field where I could not follow.

Photo by Tyler Lastovich on Unsplash