Earlier this summer I admired the logo for the southern American supermarket chain Food Lion, a proud blue lion in a square lozenge.  I was enchanted by its graphic clarity and its Euro-regal pretensions.  It all seemed a bit much, and also exactly right, for a supermarket that stocked buckets of lard and a thousand varieties of barbecue sauce.  So I was surprised to spot the logo gracing a supermarket called Delhaize in Brussels.  It turns out that Food Lion is a subsidiary of the Belgian conglomerate (also called Delhaize) that owns the chain.  When they built the Food Lion brand they reused the same logo.

I imagined that the Food Lion lion had been concocted, “Mad Men” style, by an enterprising, low-ranking manager at the American headquarters in Salisbury, North Carolina sometime around 1962.  In a way the lion has become the mascot for my peripatetic summer.  What was there tying together my small-town Arkansas days and big-city European adventures?  “Le Lion,” was right there, all along, looking over me, and keeping me well.

The Wright Brothers’ field isn’t located in Kitty Hawk proper but in a neighboring North Carolina community called Kill Devil in Dare County not far from Nags Head.  The names conjure a landscape that is not a warm, bountiful refuge but a place to move away from.  The brothers relocated here, to the outer banks, from Dayton because the climate and wind speeds are optimal for test flights.  There is a flatness and lowness to the landscape, and a softness to the light too, that opens the landscape dramatically to the sky.

The brothers were bicycle repairmen, so their first machines look like bicycles with wings.  Their first motorized machines look like steampunk superhero fins strapped to a pilot.  The machine used to complete the first powered flight in 1903, a replica of which is on display at the Wright Brothers National Memorial, seems implausibly bulky, a structure arrived at after countless rounds of trial and error.  It’s the Wright Brothers’ earlier, unmanned test gliders, which in photographs appear as light as figures on a page, that capture most clearly the dream of moving away.