Wichita, Kansas, today.
I've always had the uncanny ability to shut my eyes and imagine the sounds and shadows of years gone by. The echoes of laughter and crackling of long skirts in the hallways of Versailles... the crunch of leaves beneath the feet of Indian tribes tracking in the forests of the northeast... the muffle of faded conversation and rolling wheels on the prairies of the American west. I figure it's the gift of an active imagination, though some time ago a friend of mine referred to me as "spooky" in that way. I suspect she probably was herself.
I'm in Wichita on a windy fall day, picturing all the signs of modern life around me gone, tumbleweeds blowing across the fields, and little else to see for miles. I figure it's a gift, as sometimes it is the only thing I can hear or see on the lonelier days of travel. Being a flight attendant is far more solitary than most people imagine, and especially in covid days when so many places are shut down, and at times there is nothing more than my gift to rely upon to keep me company on long layovers. The whistling sound is haunting when there is nothing else to break it's consistency. I heard it last on a hilltop in Montana where there was an iron fence surrounding a plot of land with only a few gravestones on it bent and crooked with time. Some plastic flowers placed by someone in the past several years, now dirty from the dust shifted by the wind and deposited there. Again, as I looked around, there was nothing but my imagination to create life.
I haven't written in a long time. I think that wind stole my voice for a while. It was so much louder than what I had to say.
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