The Windmill Mom Was Told to Scrap

“Sixty years,” Kade said quietly.

“Sixty years this August,” she said. She was crying, but she was smiling too. “That stinker. That stinker made me wait sixty years.”

I helped her up. She held on to my arm a long time after she was standing, longer than she needed to. Then she took her cane back and wiped her face with the cuff of her blue jacket.

“Well,” she said. “You’ll have to put it back up.”

“The tail’s got to go on the new head,” I said. “It won’t bolt the same. The new head comes with its own tail.”

She looked at me. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to.

“I’ll make it bolt,” I said.

It took me two evenings in my shop in town with a drill and some steel strap, but I made Dad’s old tail vane bolt onto the new tail boom.

I cleaned it with a wire brush and painted it, careful around the letters, and left them bare.

That week, Glen called me. He’d heard from somebody, probably Tobias’s wife, that we had the head off and a new one coming.

“You’re wasting your money,” he said. “And you’re going to get that boy killed.”

“He’s harnessed,” I said. “He’s careful. I’m careful.”

“It’s a seventy year old tower, Merle.”

“Eighty,” I said. “And it’s tighter than your shop’s going to be.”

He didn’t laugh. He was quiet a minute, and then he said, “I’m just trying to look out for her,” and I believed him. I said I knew it. Then he hung up, and I sat in the truck a while.

The new head came on a Tuesday. It was packed in a crate on a pallet at the co-op yard, painted that bright factory gray, and the guys at work all came over to look at it like it was a new baby.

My foreman, a big quiet man who’s been at the co-op longer than me, walked around it twice and then said, “You need the boom truck Saturday?”

“I can’t ask that,” I said.

“You didn’t,” he said. “It’s sitting in the yard Saturday anyway. Somebody ought to put some hours on it.”

So the third Saturday, the co-op’s boom truck pulled into Mom’s yard right behind my pickup, and that changed everything.

With the boom, we didn’t need the gin pole for the lift. We could set the head right on the mast pipe.

But I still went up. You can’t set a windmill head from the ground. Somebody’s got to be up there guiding it onto the pipe and getting the bolts started.

And this time, Kade came up with me.

I’d thought about it all week. I’d prayed about it, if I’m honest, sitting in the pew Sunday with my wife on one side and Mom on the other.

I decided he was ready. I decided Dad would have let him.

He climbed slow, the way I’d told him. Clip, unclip, clip. I went up ahead of him and waited at the platform, and when his face came up over the edge he was grinning like it was Christmas morning.

“You can see the whole world,” he said.