A Texas Whirligig Memoir
Jan Seale
June 30, 2024
From the plane window she sees the wind machines,
turbines lined against the sky rising from the patchwork quilt
of Rio Grande farms, giant three-winged toys
dancing by command or lolling in the Gulf breeze.
And the clank-duhduh-clank of a childhood windmill
eight hundred miles north, still in Texas, this time
out on the Caprock, comes on her screen.
It’s night and the girl is only half asleep when
her aunt’s voice comes clear, “George,
get up and go turn off that windmill!”
It seems the chattering metal of the splayed-out
pinwheel, so necessary by day for the wash,
the garden, the thirst-slaking of animals
has been left in the ON position.
Now the night wind has cancelled out
the summer day and the farmer’s windmill
has succumbed to a dark insistent charm:
water happily spilling over the tank,
intent on miring the girl’s swing set below.
Precious water must be saved.
Something must be done.
A small oath bleeps from the bedroom
(the girl knows she is not supposed to hear it).
Bedsprings squeak, boots moan,
and a giant clomps through the hall. The girl knows
the uncle will bang wide the kitchen door,
march across the yard to the windmill, pull the chain,
magically closing off the water from deep down,
the water no more slopping over the side of the tank.
So the string of memory is threaded, from preparing
to land on the Texas coast among the giant winged towers,
to lowering 70 years ago to the Texas Panhandle,
a girl listening, listening all the way across Texas,
all the way across time and circumstance,
the wind making itself known on giant rotor blades
that travel the highways, mount towers, twist—
as it were—in the wind, fulfill their electrical destiny;
the wind skipping across giant Texas to the whirligigs
huffing icy water from deep aquifers.
And long-ago girls listen to the clank-duhduh-clank,
then, hearing nothing, drift into sleep, knowing
their swing sets, and they, are safe come morning.
Jan Seale lives in deep South Texas. She has authored nine poetry volumes as well as books in fiction, nonfiction, and children's literature. She is the 2012 Texas Poet Laureate.
