planes and perspectives

I live near a small general aviation airport where people live in the hangars and from which soar pilots to perform stunts over my house on nice days. It’s like I have a personal air show. I’ll peer up into the blue sky, my stomach churning in vicarious agony, as a biplane soars straight up, stalls, then goes in a nosedive, only to pull out at what feels like the last minute.

Like birds or butterflies or bats, only louder.

Like a rollercoaster without the rails.

For the past few weeks, my husband has been taking flying lessons, so I’ve been paying more attention to these engines in the sky. To the noise and what it means, but also remembering the feeling of what it is like to fly, especially in a small plane.

Once upon a time when I wasn’t expecting it, I went up in a two-person plane to take some aerial photographs. I’d gone to work that day in a suit (with a pencil skirt), and I thought the joystick between my legs quite fresh. Oh, and I had met the pilot about fifteen minutes before we went up in the air.

But I’ll admit that there was an unbridled sense of freedom, of escaping from not only the constraints of gravity, but also those of my normal geography. Those streets and buildings that I normally used to navigate my daily commute meant nothing. They were just things down on the ground, and all that was around us was sky—oh, and that plane flying up here with us quite a ways off, but too close for my comfort.

I liked it when we got back down to the ground.

Still, Is it no wonder we as humans figured out how to fly? That we study the wings of birds and use parachutes and go base jumping? It’s like we know there’s more than what’s here on the ground, and we need to get some perspective.

Weekends are like that, too. Time for perspective.