The whining drone of a small plane is a sound that I’ve always associated with the warm afternoons of my childhood summers. We had a yellow-with-red-trim swing-set – two swings and a two-seated glider, wooden slat swing seats, heavy chains linking the swings to the crossbar at the top, no sliding board. I’d swing until the chains were parallel with the ground, legs pumping, head hanging back, warm summer air whooshing past my face, freeing me from gravity and ground and body.

There was a small airstrip a couple of miles past the fields that bordered my house. My grandparents, who lived next door in the small white frame house with raspberry bushes in the back along the spring run, referred to the owner of the landing field and the plane that flew from there as “Rudy”. I never knew any more about him, only that he was apparently the pilot and was approximately my grandparents’ age. His was, of course, not the only small plane that traveled over our development of houses and the corn fields and cow pastures that surrounded us, but whenever a plane flew overhead I thought of the storied Rudy and his airstrip and how lucky he was to have the freedom to lift up into the sky whenever he wanted.

This evening, when it’s just started to head toward plum-colored twilight, I’m sitting outside, and the lawn mowers have stopped, and the neighborhood children have been taken inside for their evening baths, and even the little breeze that was sussing through the leaves earlier has quieted. That familiar hypnotic droning noise buzzes around me, although the plane is invisible in the still-blue sky, the laws that govern the speed of sight and sound firmly in place. And I’m returned to a time when my hair hung down behind my head, brushing the grass, and my Keds-clad toes pointed to the clouds and I dreamed of castles and fairies and blue bottles, and let the sound of a plane transport me to places even my dreams could not take me.