Wind She Sang – The Prequel of Kathie Caldwell

Jun 24, 2025

Kathie Caldwell, the aerospace engineer

I. Flightpath to Nowhere

Kathie Caldwell’s first rebellion took the form of a paper airplane.

She was six, sitting in the hangar office of Caldwell Flight School—her grandfather’s kingdom of rusted propellers and squeaky tarmac. Outside, real planes learned how to rise. Inside, Kathie sat with her legs swinging off a file cabinet, folding a page from her math workbook into a sharply creased dart.

The paper plane soared once, hit a ceiling fan, and exploded into shreds. That day, she decided she’d design planes that didn’t obey ceilings.

“Altitude is attitude,” her father used to say, slapping his gloves after every flight. And Kathie believed it. She believed him.

Until he died trying to land on a fogged-out strip near Bozeman.

That was the second rebellion.

Not against the sky, but against the idea of obeying it.

II. William in the Cockpit

By 28, Kathie had crushed every academic ceiling in aerodynamics and propulsion systems, working at Titan AeroCorp, a behemoth more concerned with margins than miracles.

There, she met Captain William Hargrave—the kind of man whose flight suit somehow always stayed ironed and whose voice sounded like it knew secrets. He was married, of course. They all were.

Their affair took off quietly: cafeteria coffee, late-night design reviews, suddenly extended business trips. They didn’t talk about the wife in York or the kids in boarding school.

They talked about lift equations and the idea of a plane that could hover indefinitely at 9,000 feet using no fossil fuel, just wind shear and solar feathering.

He kissed her once midflight—auto-pilot engaged, nose just brushing the cumulus shelf.

He left a year later.

No drama. Just a voicemail from Heathrow:

“I’m going back to try. I owe them that.”

She never replied.

Instead, she built a wind tunnel in her garage.

III. A Napkin from Carmel

Three years later, burned out and borderline insomniac, Kathie nearly missed the flyer on the café wall in Carmel-by-the-Sea:

WANTED: Flight Engineer for Unlicensed, Unprecedented Aerial Project. Must not fear the word “impossible.”
Contact: Harry Atkins. Bring your own screwdriver.

Below that, a napkin sketch. A clumsy drawing of what looked like a flying camper stapled to a dirigible.

It was either a joke… or a lifeline.

She drove out to the cliffside hangar expecting a lunatic. She found one. But the man had conviction. And a prototype.

Harry pointed to her boots and said, “You’re not a flats person. Come inside.”

IV. The Hangar Between Earth and Elsewhere

Kathie never left.

She moved her things into a gutted Airstream motorhome with duct tape still on the windows. The others arrived gradually: Geoffrey with his solar kites, Phoebus with his weathered maps and bad coffee, Simon who never stopped sketching, and Oscar who talked to birds like they were satellites.

But it was Kathie’s equations that made the Skyhome drift, hover, and live.

Her motorhome became a storm of blueprints and whirring fans. Her hands became calloused. Her heart stayed shelved—tucked behind a rusted compass from William and an unopened email marked Happy Birthday, K.

They called her The Lift Witch, mostly in admiration.

She never smiled when they said it.

V. The Clock and the Ritual

Harry ran meetings with an hourglass that trickled gold dust. Kathie despised it at first—too poetic, too performative.

Then one evening, while recalibrating the thrust curves of the stabilizer fins during a storm warning, she flipped the hourglass herself. Just to see if she could finish the adjustment before time ran out.

She did. It became her ritual too.

Fifteen minutes to do the impossible.
Fifteen minutes to forget William.

VI. Letters Never Sent

Sometimes, when the others weren’t watching, Kathie opened a terminal and typed drafts of emails she never sent.

To: William Hargrave
Subject: Nothing that matters anymore
Dear W—
You were right. About needing gravity.
I was wrong. About thinking I didn’t.
But I built something that floats anyway.
I hope your sky is kind to you.
—K

She deleted each draft after reading it aloud once—quietly, like a voice test before a radio launch.

VII. Pusteblumen

There was a tradition. If separated, the Skyhome team would gather at the edge of the atmospheric stream known as Pusteblumen—a radiant, swirling gas formation like a glowing dandelion puff in the night sky.

Kathie named it.

She never said why.

But everyone knew.

To this day, when the Skyhome drifts near the edge of the world, where the wind turns blue and the sky folds in on itself like a sleeping bird’s wing—Kathie stands alone at the outer deck, eyes closed, breathing in silence.

They say she hears the wind singing.

She swears it once called her by name.

VIII. Final Note from the Motorhome Wall

In her motorhome, scratched lightly into the aluminum siding next to her desk, is a single phrase:

“If you want to reach the stars, you’ve got to leave the baggage behind.”

Below it, a tiny drawing of a plane. No wheels. No cockpit. Just wings—and a compass with no north.