soaring birds

There are so many birds at this time of year. Or maybe I’m just opening my eyes and noticing them more. They’re always soaring, wonderfully black and clear against September skies: versatile skies which change their shade and colour every hour, of every day, so no two bird silhouette moments will ever look the same when my head remembers them.

These dark soaring shapes always make my heart leap a little: it feels a tiny bit like love. Something to do with the freedom? And knowing how wonderful it must feel to fly through thin air, as if it’s the easiest thing in the world?

I used to dream that I could fly when I was a kid.

It was the exact opposite of effortless: I had to flap my arms as hard as humanly possible. And believe: believe so strongly that I could fly.  And not doubt it, for one second.

If I got it right I could soar down the stairs from the long landing of our childhood home, sweep out of the (handily wide-open) heavy red painted front door with it’s chrome ’36’ and climb up, up and away into the clear blue sky: swoop over over Main Street, down the hill towards ‘Longbottoms’ in the Village and then up and out and up and away above Stamford Bridge. I knew exactly how our home-village looked, from 20, 30, 60 foot above, 26 years ago.

Such brilliant, vivid dreams. Hugely disappointing to wake up of course and realise it wasn’t true. I couldn’t fly after all. Not in real life.

But you know how the feeling of a dream stays with you?  I can tell you (if you’ve never been lucky enough to have a flying dream before) there’s no feeling quite like the pure elation of joyful, machine-less-ness flight.

For a second, when I see a winged silhouette soaring off to who knows where, I almost catch a whisp-of-that-long-lost-dream-feeling again.  Sure, the feeling has dissolved again, almost before the second is over.  But I had it, for the middle of a second. And it’s enough.