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It's been a long time since we launched kites into the wind, perhaps more than forty years, which are many, but the memory is still there, alive and nostalgic.
I remember that we started going to look for the canes in the nearby ravines, which, at that time, we didn't have to go very far, because our neighbourhood, Escaleritas, was still on the external border and had not been engulfed by the city of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and we enjoyed some open spaces to play.
Right next to our street we had a small ravine, which was near the canódromo, although we called it the Galgos, because the word canódromo was somewhat strange to us and the galgos seemed to us to be a more accurate and, of course, more colloquial toponym.
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There, in that small ravine, grew some canes that we cut to make the skeleton of our future kite, then we cut them in half and assembled the structure using thread, then cut the tissue paper and glued it with a boiled potato dough, because we did not have glue.
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In order to finish we made the tail of the kite and for it we used remnants of old clothes; the shirts were our preferred ones because they weighed little and were ideal for the balance of the kite.
Then we tied the yarn mallet to the center of the kite, we went to the open field behind our street, to launch the kites we had made. We would find out the direction of the wind by using the index finger wet with saliva, then one would grab it and grab the distance, while the other would run and grab the thread until the kite would go up driven by speed and wind.
So, little by little, the kite went up and up until it reached its limit. Some, the most daring, tied another mallet for the kite to go up until we lost sight of it because they said that it asked for more, that it pulled so that we could give it more thread and we said: thread the kite.
When we had it up there, we played to send it a message, which was nothing more than a cardboard cut out of round, square or triangular shape, which we hooked to the thread and watched as our message went up spinning until it was lost from our sight.
Then we lowered it and when we had it on the ground with us, we checked that the silk paper was wet, proof that the kite had risen a lot.
Then we went home satisfied because we had done a good job, a very basic aeronautical experience, but unforgettable for the children of my time.
