The Summer We Learned to Fly

Margaret stood at the farmhouse window, watching her grandson chase the old Holstein across the pasture. The boy was running with that loose-limbed abandon of youth, his laughter carrying on the morning breeze. It took her back, as so many things did these days, to the summer of 1958.

Her father had purchased Old Ferdinand—a bull of legendary stubbornness—and the entire town had placed bets on how long it would take him to escape. What they hadn't counted on was Margaret's best friend Ruth, who at seventeen possessed a kind of fearless wisdom that Margaret, now eighty-two, still marveled at.

"He's not running away," Ruth had said, watching Ferdinand pace his fence line with what looked suspiciously like contemplation. "He's running toward something. Don't you ever feel like that?"

That question had startled Margaret. She'd been so focused on her upcoming marriage, on becoming a proper farmer's wife, on doing everything expected of her, that she'd forgotten what it meant to want something for herself.

The night Ferdinand finally escaped, Ruth woke Margaret by tapping on her bedroom window. They found the bull not in the neighbor's cornfield, as everyone assumed, but standing knee-deep in Miller's Pond, staring at his reflection in the moonlight. He wasn't destroying crops or causing chaos. He was simply experiencing something new.

Ruth had sat on the dock and dangled her feet in the water. "Maybe we're all just waiting for someone to open the gate," she'd said softly.

Margaret's grandson burst into the kitchen now, cheeks flushed, hair wild with static and burrs. "Grandma, you should come outside! The old cow let me pet her!"

She smiled, thinking of Ruth, who had passed away five years ago but whose question still echoed through Margaret's quiet evenings. Ruth had never married, had traveled to places Margaret had only seen in magazines, had lived with a beautiful disregard for convention. And Margaret had married, had farmed, had raised children and grandchildren, had built a legacy in soil and seasons.

Both paths, she'd come to understand, were equally valid. Both were ways of running toward something.

"Tell you what," Margaret said, reaching for her sweater. "Let's go visit Ferdinand together. I have a story to tell you about friendship and the summer two girls learned that sometimes the bravest thing you can do is simply stand still and appreciate where you are."

The boy took her hand, his palm warm and alive with promise. Outside, the morning was just beginning, full of possibility, and somewhere in her heart, Margaret could almost hear Ruth's laughter, still running through the years like a creek through familiar valleys.