Brothers – Kitty Hawk, November 2024

There are six of us. Born to John and Janice who have now passed on. My parents married in 1953 and chased my father’s career across New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York for nearly two decades. They finally settled in rural Pennsylvania—a place my father referred to as “the armpit of the universe.” I had recently turned sixteen and this was my eighth home.

I stayed in Pennsylvania long enough to earn a high school diploma and began my own wanderings. My brothers also scattered, some leaving the state altogether, and as my parents aged, we coordinated annual reunions, cumulating in two final gatherings, one in 2021 to bury my mother, and another in 2023 to put my father to rest.

Family visits have since become catch as catch can, sporadic and incomplete. And as my appetite for travel waned, I started nudging my brothers to come visit me and Bob in North Carolina.

John and his wife, Darla, have driven down to see us a couple of times, and earlier this year Jim and Kathryn said, “We’re really coming down this time.” They would drive down from Massachusetts, we would meet at the beach, and Joseph would fly in from California. Then we would all drive back to our humble abode.

So Bob and I got to work spiffing up our house. I fluffed and dusted while Bob, as per usual, did the heavy lifting, spending days painting the guest bathroom.

Bob and I were the first to arrive and quickly slipped into relaxation mode. He had booked a beach house with three beds for two nights.

Former pilot, Jim, had never been to the Wright Brothers National Memorial, so we went. The forecast for our one full day in Kitty Hawk had been for rain, but we lucked out and it stayed dry.

We began our tour in the visitor center learning about the Wright family and the history of aviation and gaping at a replica of Wilbur and Orville’s ground-breaking invention.

Bob and I had visited the Memorial two years ago with our friends Henry and Kelly.

Henry was Bob’s high school roommate at TASIS, The American School in Switzerland. Like brother Joe, Henry and Kelly live in San Francisco.

But, back to 2024. Here are Joe and Bob standing outside the visitor center with the flight path and a small airstrip in the background.

I was struck by the parallels between Wilbur and Orville Wright and my brothers, Joe and Jim. Both extremely intelligent, born four years apart, and avid bikers—the Wright brothers ran a bicycle shop before pursuing flight.

Two of my brothers, Bob and Jim, acquired pilots licenses early in life.

We climbed Kill Devil Hill for the exercise and to put ourselves in Wilbur and Orville’s shoes, imagining for a moment what it might have been like to launch ourselves into the air on faith alone.

I watched my brothers with pride, both so healthy and curious, thinking about Wilbur and Orville’s supportive older sister, Katherine, and made a promise to myself to follow in her footsteps.

To complete our foray into the Wright Brothers experience, we drove to the sculpture park on the other side of the monument.

At the visitors center, the hard copy urged us to stay on the trail lest we puncture our footwear with prickly pear cactus.

We drove four hours inland the next day and Spot got to meet the gang.

I picked up the mail and found a package of hand-harvested wild rice from Amy Armantrout which the five of us later ate atop steaming bowls of stir fry garnished with daikon steaks from our garden.

Joe’s birthday was coming up on December 4, so I baked a cherry pie and we sang to him.

Later, after Joe returned to California, Jim, Kathryn, and I visited the Raleigh Executive Airport. Jim seemed to know each model plane by sight and was savvy enough to look up them up online. “That’s a 1957 Piper Cub,” he’d say, or “That’s just like the plane I used to fly.”

That evening we hosted a small dinner party with some of our neighbors and the next morning Jim and Kathryn left before dawn to begin their twelve hour drive home.

Cards, letters, and phone calls are great ways of keeping in touch, but nothing can replace sharing time and space together. Now, when we talk on the phone and I tell Jim or Kathryn that I’m at my desk or in the garden, they have a mental image of me in that space in the same way Bob and I can picture their kitchen and yard after visiting in July.