Apparently I have taken sky pictures including vapor trails on this date for two years. Y’all may know them as contrails. When I was a kid we called them vapor trails. Or some of us did but more later. This is this year’s pic, with a thin vapor trail. I think the plane was still above me at the time or had only recently passed over.

Last year, I got this beautiful dissipating vapor trail, almost like lace. Another beautiful day in the southeast Great Lake State with leaves just coming out.

When I was a kid, I had a good friend at the moominbeach who called vapor trails “paper jails”. She was a couple years younger than me and mis-heard the words. We were good friends anyway but I could sometimes be mean to her, something I have always regretted. There was the one time I gave her an “Indian Burn” where I twisted the skin on her arm in two different directions. Did you guys ever give someone an Indian Burn? My parents marched me down to her family’s moominbeach cabin to apologize.

I did apologize but inside my 10-year-old head I was thinking something like, “But my older boy cousins did this to me and it hurt a bit but but but… why was this so bad?” Us younger cousins learned this and practiced it on our own younger siblings and friends.

Indian Burns hurt but don’t cause lasting damage. Of course I know now that given the right circumstances benign things like Indian Burns could maybe escalate into enjoying hurting (or even killing) other people/animals. I definitely didn’t get to that point and neither did my cousins.

To be CRYSTAL CLEAR: My male cousins are wonderful people who take care of their friends and animals. I love them. Sad that my brother didn’t live long enough to a part of that benevolent fraternity…

This entry was posted on Friday, May 10th, 2019 at 6:32 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.