on a cloud when she grew tired. The eight-year-old now had a life plan that she shared with the family over fried chicken and cornbread: she, Miss Julep Lee, would become a pilot and be just like Amelia Earhart when she grew up.
     At first, her family laughed and dismissed it as just another phase. After all, hadn’t she wanted to be a tightrope walker just last week? It didn’t take the Lee’s long to realize just how serious she was, as she started covering her walls with newspaper clippings of her idol and swaggering around in a leather jacket dug out from G-d knows where. Mama put her foot down at letting Julep bob her hair.
     “Maybe that’s what they’re doin up North,” she declared, “but no daughter of mine is going to church looking like a wet dog!”
     For her birthday, Julep’s brothers biked twenty miles each way to the next town over and spent a dusty afternoon in a junk shop, emerging victorious with second hand flight manuals, much to their mother’s chagrin. Eventually, the cheap bindings fell apart from being opened so often. Reading wasn’t enough though, she needed to fly. It soon became common knowledge throughout town that if you needed an odd job done, Miss Julep was your girl, as long as you were willing to contribute to her flying lesson fund. Though the town thought she was wilder than one of her father’s stallions, everyone loved the girl who dared to dream and everyone rallied behind Julep. Her classmates collected bottles for the deposit money and the church ladies held bake sales, the Presbyterians trying to raise more money than the Baptists down the street. Even with everyone’s help, the aspiring pilot might never have made it to the sky if her father’s prize thoroughbred hadn’t grown into the fastest horse this side of the Mississippi. Lightning’s stud fees made Julep’s dreams a reality. Before her first lesson the whole town came to wish Julep well before she began the twenty mile bicycle ride to the airfield. After ten years of years of hoping and scheming, Miss Julep Lee got her wings.
    The winds of war might have been blowing across Europe, but Julep, who started a crop dusting service, was oblivious to it. She had her head in the clouds, quite literally, until Pearl Harbor. Julep, and the rest of America, came crashing down to earth. She wanted to do something, anything, to get the Japanese, the Nazis, everyone who was turning the world upside down, but there was nothing she could do. The air force didn’t want female pilots. Instead, she spent endless days rolling bandages for the Red Cross as her brother’s risked their lives in Europe and the Pacific. When she heard that women pilots were needed to ferry planes and supplies across the country, Julep knew her prayers had been answered. 

     The initial training was grueling, but Julep's WASP days were the best years of her life.
     “The girls here feel like family,” Julep wrote back home from her base in Texas. “They share letters from their sweethearts and packages from home. They especially loved the molasses cookies you sent, Mama. I had to fight the girls off to get some for myself! It feels so good to finally have a purpose. I’m doing lifesaving work. Every jet or bomber I deliver could be the difference between us winning or losing the war.”
     When the Lees first got the news that Julep had gone missing ferrying a Boeing P-26 to a base in Hawaii, they were surprised. She had such a wonderful sense of direction. Papa assured Mama it was probably a mix up, that these sorts of mistakes happened all the time during a war. Julep would turn up. After all, hadn’t she found her way back home after getting blown a hundred miles of course in a storm? Her radio had probably gone down and they’d hear from Julep in a couple days.
Well, those days turned into weeks turned into months and the town, despite keeping Julep in their prayers, began to lose hope as the war ended and their boys returned home. The Lees refused to believe it. A spark like Julip’s couldn’t be extinguished that easily. They would have known. The whole world would have felt her absence.
     The war never really ended on that farm in Kentucky. Even as it filled with grandchildren and noise and Mama and Papa became older and frailer, their nightly ritual never changed. Before going up to bed, Papa would go out on the porch he built and stare up at the stars. Maybe one would be a bit brighter, a bit bigger, coming closer and closer until it took the shape of a plane. Maybe that chittering sound was his baby girl’s laugh instead of the crickets like every other evening. Eventually, Papa would shuffle back inside and shake his head slowly to Mama’s unasked question. Mama would sigh and go to the front window to light a candle. It took a while for her arthritic hands to light the match but it was worth it. The light might help her find the way back home.