Piccadilly Lilly: Back by Lunch

It might have been the early morning air or the too few hours of sleep from the short night before, but Kat did not to think very long about the note.  She looked over to the other side of the runway at Higgs's Airport office – no smoke rising from the morning wood stove yet – took the note back into the diner, flipped it over and wrote to Merle "back by lunch."  Merle would be in by 6:30 to start in the kitchen. If she saw him, she wouldn't get back in the Cessna,

that much she knew, so she hustled, almost sneaking, back to the plane, sat down in the pilot's seat, closed herself in, took a deep breath, looked out over the empty flat of the runway, quickly reacquainted herself with the instrument panel she knew well, hit the mix, pushed the carb, switch on, skipped the prime, hit the throttle and finally turned the master on and she was off, lifting at the column to gently rise up off the runway into the brightening turquoise.

Even though she had never flown as pilot herself before, she might very well have been the most experienced non-pilot of all the travelers at Lone Rock.  She was introduced to planes by her grandfather when she was young.  One Christmas, when she was nine, grandpa and dad were proud to have land the grand dame fortress Piccadilly at Lone Rock as part of a heritage tour.  Because they had been part of rebuilding the old bomber in Chicago, they were allowed to decorate the fuselage Christmas morning and Kat opened gifts huddled around a short but real pine tree decorated and sprayed with fake snow.

She'd logged hundreds of hours over in the other seat of her dad's Cessna '66.  She knew weather, wind and distance and most importantly could feel the interplay of machine and flight as well as anybody.  The morning had brightened.  She looked down at Lone Rock and had lost the details on the ground but gained the broad shapes of landscape geometry of Sauk County.