With our hair tousled by gusts of wind, facing the rippling lake and the herons struggling to fly, my sister and I were searching for the perfect spot to launch our kite.
The trees were shedding the last of their leaves, and the waves were crashing against the rocks, transforming into a billion tiny droplets that hung in the air. In our hearts, we had already realized that it wasn’t the right day to relive our childhood games. But the sun was shining so brightly that going back home seemed like a mortal sin, so we decided to give it a try anyway.
When we were girls and still lived in the city, we couldn’t wait for the weekend to escape to the countryside to visit our grandmother, eat freshly picked vegetables, and play with our cousins. But if the day was windy just right, the fun doubled because we all went out together to fly kites, which, with their harmonious dance in the sky, lured us away from our family post-lunch gatherings.
Handcrafted by Dad and Uncle Gabriele using wicker sticks, homemade glue, and colored paper featuring two big eyes drawn on them, our kites had only one string because that way, as Dad put it, they would be freer to soar in the sky and perform their favorite acrobatics. Those were truly enchanting days when we could marvel at holding in our hands a string moved by the wind and share our dreams with the clouds.
I fondly remember the kites’ tails swaying in the air, their sudden descent and ascent, the bumps, and the string occasionally getting caught in some shrubs. I can still hear our laughter, feel the joy of the kites displaying their colors in the sky, watching us from above, proud and glittering in the sunlight, entrusting their fate to the whims of the wind.
To get them off the ground, I needed Dad’s help. He would start running into the wind with one hand held high, gripping the kite, and the other hand holding the spool with the string. Patient and determined, moving swiftly with his gaze fixed upwards, he wouldn’t stop until the kite gracefully soared into the ether, and we, young girls, amidst applause and shouts of joy, let ourselves be captivated by that mysterious object that could fly even though it had no wings.
There was only purity in those childhood games, when with a piece of paper and a couple of sticks, you could communicate with the sky, occasionally wondering if that distant kite was afraid of falling.
Eternal and adventurous, it rose into the void, and we watched, immersing ourselves in its unpredictable flight, clutching the string that served as a bridge between the earth and the infinite.
Aunt Gilda often told us that kites, once set free, gained a life of their own. “On warm summer evenings, even better in the moonlight, if you let them go and make them disappear completely from view, when you pull them back down to their place, you’ll find a star“, she always said, and we believed it. We still do.
Lost in that sea of memories, beautiful and reassuring as mother’s goodnight kisses, sitting on the grass with a hot herbal infusion from the thermos, I noticed the wind calming down and saw my sister’s silhouette in the distance running and shouting joyfully on the sand as if she were still a little girl: “Make a wish! Our kite has reached the sun!“
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