Finding Direction: The Wind Vane Chronicles

[Note:  This was my very first "Wind Vane" story the day (on March 1, after two weeks of blogging back in February 2005) I changed the name of my blog from "Meandering Footprints" to "Finding Direction: The Wind Vane Chronicles (thus the first comment from then following).  It is from my would be book, so is more polished and well written than many of the blog posts I write.   A short essay.

It is about why I so love the wind.  About home.  I hope you enjoy it.  I happen to love this post because it is about my own home growing up.  Dee]

 Certain forces in our lives, particularly in childhood, profoundly influence and shape the way we perceive the world forever afterward. Such forces worked in me, indelibly imprinting, far below the surface of conscious thought - at the core, where lasting impressions and innermost feelings dwell - certain foundations for rational thought, and perhaps, irrational notions, of how the world should be.

One of the most powerful of those forces was the wind. At the time I was unaware, except innately, and perhaps emotionally, that the wind - a constant presence in the vast West Texas landscape - was etching my heart in such an fundamental way. It left its intrinsic mark on everything it touched, nothing could escape its power. It could be a frightful fiend, as well a friend. But how could I escape?

The wind always blew; no relief existed. It whipped the air, sand stinging the skin and irritating the eyes. Sculpted dunes born of wind and soil sent tumbleweeds rolling across the land. Wind sang a chorus of whistles and moans, sometimes in cacophony of noise, sometimes sighs and whispers, but always, it sang. Wind echoed, as well, in windmills’ creaks and groans as together the mills and wind brought necessary water to the surface to sooth the parched, dry land.

Without wind to provide water’s power, the land could provide no crops or bring relief to weary farmers. My truest visions of life are sculpted not only by the long remembered, never forgotten wind that was always blowing, but by the vast open plains and the small community of people who surrounded me, giving me not only the capability to follow the wind where it would lead; but also to return - at least in my dreams and innate self - to home.

In my mind, the ideal world, and especially "home," is a solitary place in an ocean of azure skies and green and brown checkered fields, with a broad, unending horizon sprouting towns and grain elevators and cotton gins on mirage-mirrored mornings. One can step outside the door and see the world for as far as one’s eyes can see. Growing up in such a world provided a strong continuity of community.

While life often seemed stifling and confining at the time, it was a place where everyone knew not only everyone else, but everyone else’s family. They knew mothers and dads, grandmothers and granddads, aunts, uncles and cousins, by marriage or by blood, by kith or by kin; the entire history of the community was known collectively.

Thus, collectively the community attained the level of family and participated as a whole in the raising of children by providing the network for life’s learning and safety net for childhood’s failings. I never felt far from home, despite the vastness of space around me. Someone I knew or who knew me was always near by.

No strangers lived in such a world, only neighbors and friends. I lived there for only eight short years of my childhood life, and yet in dreams and in my heart, it is the place that is home. For me, home will forever be on the plains of West Texas. That strikes me as odd, somehow, yet true. I often wonder what it is that evokes such strong memories, so as to etch forever in my subconscious mind the vast plains as my home? It seems especially odd because I do not remember that period of my life as being particularly happy.

In fact, some of my childhood memories are unhappy ones, although, to be fair, such memories are not particularly tied to the place in which they were experienced, but more to my own circumstances and the fact that these were primarily my adolescent years - not good years for some people, no matter where they live.

Thus, at the time, future dreams of the plains as home would have struck me as incongruous, not only because I had not lived much of my life there, but because I was in such a hurry to leave it. The bigger surprise came upon leaving when I found I immediately longed to go back, to find comfort somehow, and the security of "home," if not to stay and live.

I suppose the biggest surprise of all has been that even now, some forty something years later, the precise place - an old community typical of the South Plains, Abernathy, Texas - with its 3,000 souls remaining (more or less), is the place I tell everyone I’m from. It’s the community I think of as home. It is the place I want to be from, the place I feel describes best what I am all about, where my roots are, what has shaped me most, and made me the person that I am.

I believe my feelings and experience of what constitutes the essence of "home" are not uncommon. While individual experiences, personalities and inclinations may be strikingly different, colored by singular perceptions and sentiments, we collectively carry with us core characteristics that have value and worth in the world.

Or we should - once we did. For those of us who were born in such a place, moved to such a place to live, live in such a place now, or who left such a place, but still return - as many do - I believe there are important lessons we learned there, that we should recall and pass along wherever we presently live; lessons derived from what such a place is all about. Good and true lessons such places taught about the world - things like the eternal wind, wide, open spaces and, most of all, what community means in a world where "community" has become precious commodity.

We all seek direction in our lives, though we may often lose our way. Sometimes it takes many years to find the right track, or we lose our compasses along the way, or lose the wind which blows us on, or forget that we even need to move from where we are. Always, I think, we must seek within and without, to search our own compass, steer our own course and set our own bearings by the beacons that light our way. We must constantly return to the sources from which we draw our strength. We must listen to the messages of the wind, the plains and "home," and continue to feel the shaping of our lives by their power.

We must remember in our maturity the goodness of the family and community of our youth, discarding distant, dusty memories of all we thought was wrong with our lives at the time, and propel ourselves forward on winds of hope and promise, and, most of all, love. For it is in the remembering and loving of the place called home that we derive meaning as we go out into the rest of the world around us.

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