Wind

In Oklahoma, when the young woman's grandma was only a girl, the wind sucked the red soil from under the farmers' feet. The nourishment of plants, the livelihood of people , settled everywhere in fine, useless dust. The people gathered up what they could of their lives, and many moved away. But Grandma's folks stayed. Her daddy stayed where he had raised his children till he reached a hundred and two, and she and her husband came back and lived with him when he grew too old to live alone.

The young woman liked the wind. She liked the flattening wave that whipped tree tops towards the ground before suspending itself, like an intake of breath, to let them spring back against a greeny-gray Midwestern sky. She liked the crisp, winging gusts of fall and the caressing air of balmy summer evenings. "The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes," Jesus told Nicodemus. "So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit." The statement seemed free and intangible to her. It thrilled and frightened. For as much as she gloried in wind, she treasured roots--the living, fibrous ties that anchored her to the earth of her home place, to the dark loam of Illinois fields.

She stood in the midst of those fields now, revisiting a farm which had belonged to the Illinois side of the family for a hundred years. She crouched down to offer her fingertips to a tortoiseshell kitten sitting by the back door of the farmhouse. It recoiled from the unfamiliar sunscreen scent of her hands, glancing into her eyes with cool yellow suspicion. She smiled a little and straightened up. Friendship might come later. Anyhow, kittens came and went. As she walked to the porch, windflung melody fell around her in drops half-weighty and half-ethereal, as children of lead pipes and open columns of air ought to be.

Hearing her steps, a handful of dogs hollered behind the glass door. She greeted them in sprightly, high-pitched tones. One pressed his face toward her; she reached toward him, the pane of glass smooth between a black nose and a pink finger. The racket brought no hand to the latch, no commanding voice to silence the dogs' excitement. No one was home. She did not mind the chance to retrace steps alone, remembering, perhaps reliving.

A little girl had crunched over this gravel lane, her black rubber boots clomping beside her grandfather's large ones. The little girl was happy: happy in the comfortable sag of dusty jeans, happy in the confident swing of arms in this privileged place next to the king of her favorite kingdom, very happy in the accompanying entourage of eager cats and dogs. Morning chores, feeding time, routine of animals fed at the barn, the machine shed, and finally the grinding shed and cattle lot--at night she fell asleep determined not to miss her place within it.

The woman stopped walking, stood in the wind between barn and corn crib, looked down the lane into the slanting darkness of the machine shed. The lane seemed shrunken. She could not remember. She could not remember why it had mattered so much. A feeling like a swallow of underchewed beef caught in her throat. And she surrendered to the dart of longing for the tall, stooped shouldered man with skilled, swollen knuckled hands. She wanted to watch those fingers rub a lap dog's chest with their intrinsic, inimitable gesture. But even as she opened her hand to a goodbye she hadn't wanted and to a pain that acknowledged the truth, the feelings left her, like petals wind-whipped from her palm. Something was escaping--something she had tried hard to retain. It wasn't just the old man who was gone. . . it was the little girl.

The woman looked for traces of her, feet following the curve of the gray lane past the machine shed. Set back in a grassy patch, a tiny shed-like building waited for investigation. The first thing she noticed about the "secret hiding place" was the way the whole structure leaned, like a clumsy Popsicle stick construction, rotting boards like splintered ends of sticks wrestled in half by childish fingers. A sapling flourished through one corner of the roof, its bushy top tilted at an absurd angle over rusted tin.

Crouching low, she peered through the square entrance of the secret hiding place. Evidently, a coon had found it still habitable. She stepped gingerly inside, avoiding the semi-dry piles on the floor. The hideout's objective valuables had already been removed from its scanty shelter--an old metal milk jug and a carpenter's chest. The chest's treasure had been an eclectic hoard: the heavy blue glass--a chipped remnant of the set received by her parents as a wedding gift, assorted corn cobs, a toy tractor tire found somewhere on the farm and assumed to have once belonged to an uncle.

Something remained, though. The tin lay upside down by the wall--it carried writing supplies, the woman remembered. Carefully, she drew it away from coon droppings and opened it like a clam shell. Curled pages filled most of the shallow interior, whatever scribblings they may have contained hopelessly effaced by black mold. But a smoky blue pencil leaned against the edge, relatively sharp and clean, still ready for use. She remembered selecting that package of pencils at the start of a school-year. The package had said the pencils were made of recycled blue jeans, and she had liked the color. The lead had turned out not the least bit scratchy or keen--too soft. But really, the color was unique. Still. She shut the clam shell and laid it back down on the floor boards.

Before she turned to go, she considered taking a thick wedge of broken bell with her. The heavy dinner bell had crashed down beside Grandma when she tried to ring it years ago. "A bell almost killed me!" Grandma told a visitor just entering the farm. She laughed when she recounted the story to her family, remembering how he must have thought she was crazy. But the young woman couldn't think of a good use for the reddish-brown wedge, so she left it, uneasily, behind.

On the stoop of the secret hideout, she sat down and waited and watched. The wind blew over the farm, flowing past thinned out tree trunks across the lane. The trees used to live in a miniature wilderness, but now they breathed in the wind next to perfect circles of old wagon wheels stuck amongst them like sculptures. She let the wind blow through her--rushing over her face, smoothing back her hair. She submitted to its remorseless sweeping, sweeping, blowing away, leaving bare. It was not an unkind wind--robust but very warm for the last days of March. She wondered what she would find when it ceased.