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The Lusty, Gusty Ol' Wind
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15166 |
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LIFE
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| Issue
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4 / 1989 |
1,481 Words |
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Kathryn N. Hardin
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Today, as a conversational gambit at social gatherings, the question "What's your sign?" has been replaced with "What's your element?"
When I informed my husband of this, he said that if he went to a party where people asked him about his element, he'd know he was out of his element.
Well, I know exactly what my element is, and I make it a point to seek out people who might want to know. But so far the usual questions I've been asked are "Have you tried the broccoli dip?" and "Where's the bathroom?"
My element is air. Fire, earth, and water take a backseat to air as far as I'm concerned.
I don't know how one's element is ascertained--whether one is born into it or chose it--but I revere air! Not just any air. I go for the clear, well-behaved, preferably moving kind. Lyall Watson's book Heaven's Breath--which I found to be every bit as fascinating as Gone with the Wind--points out that air has to be in motion to be effective. He states that winds are the circulatory and nervous systems of the earth, without which our planet could not function properly.
This is also true in my personal relationship with air. I'm an asthmatic and when I'm in respiratory distress, I turn on ceiling and floor fans at full speed to assist me in my efforts to breathe. My husband claims that entering the master bedroom at such times is like going into a wind tunnel at the NASA research lab. He also says that he has to sleep with the bedclothes anchored down to keep them from flying off during the night, but this is an exaggeration. Actually, if the sheets are securely tucked in, they stay on fairly well.
I became aware that air has to be moving to be productive when we bought a ranch in the Oklahoma panhandle in the early days of our marriage; there, we depended on air power for water and electricity. Fortunately, the prevailing High Plains wind was steady and strong enough to keep us supplied with both. Its reliability, however, was overshadowed by its surly disposition: It isn't an endearing breeze. And it must be of doubtful heritage because unlike most area winds--the chinook of Montana and Colorado, the Santa Ana of Southern California, the mistral of France--it doesn't have a name. Or rather, it doesn't have a legitimate name. My husband has endowed it with a number of rather colorful monikers. And on the day of the flight of the Box Kite--which will live in infamy in the memories of our Oklahoma venture--he heaped a barrage of obscenities on it that would have traumatized a lesser wind.
The construction of our young son's kite was a feat in itself, but after long hours of painstaking labor, my husband finally had it ready for flight. The instructions warned that an ordinary wind wouldn't be sufficient to fly it, so we monitored the weather as closely as the officials at Kennedy Space Center for suitable launching conditions. At last, the High Plains wind barreled in one morning at top speed, blew the roof off the chicken coop, and held it up against the side of the barn. We deemed this a proper wind and prepared for lift-off. The kite shot up like a rocket, soared into space, and promptly plummeted back to earth in a mass of string, sticks, and paper. It was as if a giant hand had crushed the life from it and hurled it at our feet.
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