My Wind Blown Mind

One of few threads that has run the entire length of my life is wind. I have lived most of my life in West Texas, where wind and dust are a big part of being outside. Dirt in the corner of my eyes and grit between my teeth are no longer all that uncomfortable. The hours I have spent listening to the wind whistle through doors and windows that don't completely seal are uncountable.

The big problem with never ending wind is that it makes people go crazy.

You want proof?

I have seen little league baseball games, soccer games and football games played in forty mph dirt filled winds, I saw a coach insist that a baseball game be played in such conditions, he had equipped his entire team with ski goggles.

I watched a man at the park near where I live assemble two kites one afternoon. It was a dusty spring day and the wind was out of the Northwest at forty gusting to fifty. In town, the wind at the surface is not always indicative of what is really going on. With all the trees in town, the "jet stream" is about 60 feet off the ground. Well, the dutiful daddy gets the kites launched with no incident. Once those kites hit the altitude where they got the full force of wind, they were history. "Gone in 60 seconds."

I once bought an oil and gas lease from a lonely old lady who lived alone forty-five miles from a town and twenty miles from her nearest neighbor. I asked her why she chose to live out there in the wind and dust. She told me " My parents moved me into this canyon when I was eleven, I married the top hand when I was seventeen, I birthed three babies here, buried two of them before they lived two years. My son made it to twenty-five and got killed by a young horse. He is buried here as well. My Husband lived to be sixty-three, worried himself to death, it stayed dry for about ten years and he wouldn't go to the doctor. The grave yard up behind this house is home to everyone but me. I hear crying babies, my sons laughter and the whisper voice of my husband in that wind. I moved to town once and I missed it. It was too quiet there and I couldn't feel anything but alone."

I often wonder if she is still out there, in the soul of the wind.

When Deanna and I first started dating, we used to go to her parents ranch in Reagan County. It was dry and dusty and the wind blew a lot of the time when I was there. The old frame house at the headquarters had a whistle, creak and groan to it, all courtesy of a constant wind. My father-in-law loved that place, he likely loved it so much it killed him to leave it. The wind still blows across that miserable piece of mesquite covered short grass prairie and I am crazy enough to think that his soul rides upon that wind. Some days he rides an easy lope, other days a full gallop, but pretty much every day, he rides.