Mila Smolinski was exercising Tuesday morning on a stationary bike at the Western Reserve Masonic Community when she noticed something outside the window.
A pink balloon and two pieces of paper were caught in a bush in the courtyard.
Smolinski, 80, a Western Reserve resident, said she wondered how the items managed to drop into the small square of nature surrounded on all sides by a building.
“I thought, ‘Oh, something must be done about that,’ ” Smolinski said.
The notes were attached to a green, deflated balloon and a pink balloon that flew away in the wind but left the note behind, said Leta Turnbaugh, fitness director at Western Reserve.
The notes were from childre
n at North Central Elementary School in Pioneer, in the far northwest corner of Ohio, as a part of a Hope Takes Flight group that honors people who have battled and overcome or lost their lives to cancer, including three children at the school, said kindergarten teacher Ashley Stewart.
Stewart helped to organize the 300-balloon launch as a way to celebrate a kindergartener in her class who finished his last round of chemotherapy last week, as well as another kindergartener who has been cancer-free for four years and a sixth-grader who has been cancer-free for five years.
“It was very emotional to see the balloons lift off,” Stewart said. “Our hope throughout this whole thing was to get the word out and to keep the hope.”
Smolinski said she remembered fastening notes to balloons and releasing them for different events throughout her life, and she was happy to find the notes.
“I’m a kid at heart, and I said I was never going to grow up, so I think it’s marvelous,” Smolinski said. “I know what it is to send those balloons out and have hopes and we want to see them come true.”
The school’s Hope Takes Flight project began three years ago and has raised more than $6,000, which has been donated to two of the student cancer survivors’ Relay for Life teams, Stewart said.
The items found at Western Reserve traveled about 170 miles and were the third and fourth found notes reported to the school, Stewart said.
Another note was found in LaGrange, 140 miles from Pioneer, and one in Binghamton, N.Y., more than 520 miles from the school.
“The kids were asking if any of the balloons have been found,” Stewart said. “They may not know the depth of it (the balloons), but they know they’re going all over.”
Turnbaugh said she contacted the school Tuesday to let it know the notes were received.
“I emailed them back and said they had traveled a great distance, just as many of them had with their cancer,” Turnbaugh said
Leta Turnbaugh, left, and Mila Smolinski hold notes they found by this bush in the Western Reserve Masonic Community courtyard.
GAZETTE PHOTO & ARTICLE BY MICHELLE SPREHE
