First lesson
The cabin smelled of warm vinyl and fuel. We taxied out behind another small aircraft and held short of the runway while a helicopter lifted off in front of us.
The instructor let me hold the yoke from taxi until the downwind leg, and the small machine answered every nudge with more patience than I expected. The horizon, which I had spent thirty years thinking of as a fixed thing, turned out to be a tool — a ruler held against the cowling, a way of asking the aircraft a question and listening for its answer. The trim wheel was the first thing that stopped feeling abstract: roll it forward and the nose drops; roll it back and the aircraft wants to climb. Not commands. Conversation.
Forty-eight minutes in the logbook. One landing, his.