Laced into Flagstaff neighborhoods, cinched into local lore, if you’ve lived here long enough you know local old timers who offer a feast of stories. I lived awhile on Dale Street across from the late Mrs. Black, the Boston-educated cowboy-savoring widow of Sheriff Black. If I saw the pink smear of her favorite dress catching sun in a window, I’d stop by for a cup of afternoon tea. She described early times in Cameron with the man Cameron is named after, and she nodded at the giant conifers outside and said that fellow Michelbach brought them in on horseback from his place on Hart Prairie for her to transplant to her yard.
Bent over dandelions one day I noticed someone parked in a car eyeing the house where I live now on Beaver Street. I didn’t think he was sizing it up for crime; I figured he might have a story to tell. Indeed he did. He was remembering almost a lifetime ago when the house was bought for a song and instead of selling it for scrap as planned, he and his father and brothers moved it from downtown to north of Forest Avenue. His mother lived in it to the end of her days before it hosted its next round of lives.
Besides the description of a lightning bolt leaping from a tree to put a hole in the attic roof, I liked hearing about him being a boy on the back porch testing a glider. It had a simple timing device designed to collapse its flight if it got up too high, but he hadn’t set that yet. He was just tossing it into the yard to trim its wings. Sure enough the wind snatched it and sent it sailing high and away. He gave chase and last saw his glider over Buffalo Park headed toward Mt. Elden.
Not a week after enjoying this story, I was up at the fire lookout doing a scan in all directions with binoculars and a bit of white caught my eye: I reset myself against the wind and re-focused and there over Doney Park was the tiny white wing span of a toy glider. I watched it circle high and dip low until it looked headed into collision with treetops and then it caught a thermal and disappeared altogether.
Now I’m a big fan of flight so I am easily amused when I blow bubbles each morning to determine wind direction. Yes, once I tossed slices of stale bread into the breeze to watch them tumble and skid farther than you think bread might. And I also threw a whole bag of bug-infested white flour off the catwalk and marveled at the shapes of white ghosts that danced in 20 mph. But catching sight of that glider—imagining it was a flying toy from Beaver Street popped through a portal from the past—pleased me so much I rummaged in my toy box for a balsa wood jet plane I was saving for a flight on my birthday. I carefully pressed wings through the slot in the body, added the stabilizer and fin and after trimming it for loops, I launched it to a home in the sky with two violet green swallows attending.
It did a giant loop over the top of the lookout and whizzed through the open northeast window and thumped a pillow on the cot, so I still have it intact to fly on my birthday.
Oh of course there’s more. On a recent dusk when the shadows were getting long and dark, and the sentences in my journal were also getting long and dark as I considered too ruefully the state of my life, I looked up pensively at the pine treetops and a flicker of color surprised my eye. Between the lookout and a near summit, I spied a red heart rising. It was a shiny party balloon dancing freely. I stepped outside and cheered it on: How merry it looked in its effortless escape into vast empty space. I put my journal away and saluted the voyage of a free heart, suddenly certain one day I’ll be the old timer, the old lady with a tea cup telling great stories about the days when fires were spotted by dreamers instead of satellites and happiness arrived by surprise like unexpected trees that show up for your yard tenderly toted by horseback from the local woods.
