Where the sky turns from an azure blue to a rosy pink the delicate new moon rests with its points toward the evening star. From these two jewels of heaven, the sunset sky grades away to a misty, mysterious horizon. The gray distance is offset with a delicate lacework of the autumn-stripped hedge of poplars with their slim, graceful lattice work, reaching to points in the pink, and where the dark earth and the white road come to the foreground, two great apple trees with their gnarled autumn boughs frame the scene of simple beauty as it fades to night. As I entered the kitchen of a little old farm house, which people who eat there choose to call the “Aviator,” cheery voices and appetizing odors greeted me in preparation for the evening meal. The clean tile floor, the whitewashed walls, the low-hung, richly stained rafters, and the old walnut chest by the brick fireplace all made me think of Aunt Maggie’s old kitchen where the pies and the cookies were kept, and that makes me think of other fireplaces and other rafters—and the folks at home.
So I just sit down to the oilcloth-covered table and try to tell them what a restless, twentieth-century lad thinks of the environment of his parents’ childhood.
Today started out very foggy, because there was no wind. We stood in the field till one o’clock waiting for the air to clear. I got a machine by four. The next hour contained enough excitement to do for the day. The planes are like mad little Indian ponies turned loose in the field—or, better still, like Pegasus bound into the air with a spirit that must be tamed by steady nerves and gentle hand. It is hard to describe just the feeling which possesses one. We are taught the principles and the movements that control the machine and then we are sent alone into the air to find an understanding of them. Perhaps you are turning a corner at an angle of forty-five degrees on the bank. Suddenly you feel something is wrong. The wind whistles louder than usual. Is it because you are pointing nose down, or are you sliding out over the rim of the curve, or down into the center of it? It is one of the three, and to correct the wrong one is to make worse the other two, yet the correction must be made. Now it is too late to figure it out, so you just correct it without thinking, and wonder which fault it was. In an animal we call it instinct, but there is an instant there which, when it passes, leaves a vacuum in the nervous system. The machine climbs like a tiger, and as we are not yet permitted to cut down the gas, it takes much strength to hold its nose down. I made fifteen five-minute rides, and now I’m pleasantly tired and relaxed.