Open Writing

Coming back to Toronto from my winter stay in Grenada in the West Indies is always a challenge. Every year it seems to get harder to settle down to my wintry environment. Not very welcoming. But I am always happy to be in my own space again, the familiarity of old things and the pleasures of hot baths and fluffy towels console me for the harshness of the weather.

The winds gusted for the entire three months of my stay in Grenada. The trade winds. They roared and blew mayhem among the trees and plants on the hillsides, and ripped the window stays off their latches, sending them crashing against the sills. For me it was wonderful! There was an exhilarating sense of freedom in the freshness of the wild breezes, and I enjoyed watching little birds hanging on for dear life on slender twigs careening back and forth in the dizzying clutches of the wind.

But alas! The kites! The unending whining, droning, and grunting of those contraptions way up in the blue, sometimes so high, you could hardly see them. The young men in the village took up the wind challenge and launched their Easter kites way back in January. And there they were, those kites, day and night, three or four of them, daring the gusts as they gyrated and moaned up in the sky, throwing a wrench into my enjoyment of the wind's madcap commotion. Particularly at nights. That's when the symphony of sounds--the croaking and barking and braying create a lively crescendo, merging with the roaring elements.

I did my best to reconcile kite and wind song in my appreciation of the situation. But it was difficult. The discordant notes of the kites seem to stain the entire vault of the sky, shutting out the more natural and harmonious tones. An appeal to their owners to temper the ruckus promptly informed me that their kites were not the ones that were 'bawling'. 'Is the boys in Red Mud', (the village across the river) 'who don't know how to make good singing kite!' Not wanting to take on a dozen strapping young men with sullen faces, I kept quiet and waited for the inevitable rain showers to silence the sleep disturbers.

The rains came. Often enough. But the kites continued droning and whining. I had hoped that the force of the raindrops would wreck the noise-makers and send them hurtling to the ground. But no, they seemed indestructible. I could not figure it out. They had mutated or something.

When I was growing up, my brother was a kite-flyer himself. Mind you, this happened only during the Easter holidays. I remember him building his contraption from the thin flexible rib of the coconut leaf; papering over the frame with colourful tissue paper, and angering our mother by stealing and stripping her good tablecloth to make the 'tail'. Pennies were saved to buy the twine that was needed to hoist this creation into the sky so he could compete with the other village boys to see whose kite could fly higher, until the entire outfit got snagged in one of the tall coconut palms. A rather short-lived enterprise.

But this modern kite was another matter. It was like a giant insect that would not die. Like in the horror movies.

I discovered the secret of its longevity one morning when I found one small kite stranded on a bush beside the road. I examined it closely. No delicate tissue paper here. The kite-makers had found a new use for green plastic garbage bags! Light and durable and waterproof, it is virtually indestructible! And cheap too. I realized I was doomed to endure kite-torture unless the wind calmed down.

No such luck. The wind roared through the weeks. The villagers complained. One older woman mutinied and summoned the police. The uniformed constable came up to the village armed with a list of the names of offenders.

Names like Psycho and Forkhead and Lion.

'You have to take down your kites,' he informed them.

The kite-flyers looked at each other.
'Not ours,' they asserted with one voice. 'Red Mud people kites.'

Red Mud belonged to another police district.

And the whining and droning continued.

© Lytrice Adam