When I was little I loved it when March came around. My grandmother had taught us how to make a kite out of the hollow sticks that we could find in the woods. We would take two sticks one longer that the other and tie them in a cross pattern with cotton twin. We would then take the twin and loop it around the four ends of the sticks making sides for our paper to be glued over for our kites. We would take newspaper and glue it over the strings around the outside of our kites. After it dried we would make a tail out of panty hose or old cloth strips and load up a stick with a large bolt of cotton twine. After hooking the other end to our kite we set out for a large field to fly our kite.
We would fly our kite as high as our strings would go out and we could do this all afternoon. Just before it got dark we would reel it back in rewinding our twine on our stick so that the next day we could do it all over again.
I remember like it was yesterday walking by Harper's 5 & 10 Store and seeing a Box Kite advertised in the window. For a quarter you could buy a ready made box kite and add your own string and fly the all new Box Kite. I quickly got a quarter from my dad so that I could be one of the first in our subdivision to have a box kite to fly. It was a lot harder to get into the air than a regular kite but the pleasure of having a store bought kite made it all the more special.
Palmer Waters
