Hermleigh

I am standing under the windmills in Hermleigh, wind in my hair. I’m longing to get back to Dallas but dreading it just the same. 

Yesterday my mother said my singing voice sounds like maybe I have sadness inside. “I’ve always had sadness inside.” I told her. 

The windmills are magnificent. They hover above us silently turning. Their faces turned to the wind like sunflowers in the sun.  The crispy grass does it too. It blows endlessly until it can no longer take it. It uproots and rolls right into town as a tumble weed. 

I wonder how these windmills sound on quiet nights, when the stars speckle the sky like pencil pricks in black wax paper. We’d draw a rainbow underneath and then cover the whole thing in black crayon before scribbling and stabbing at the wax with a pencil. 

Is that what it sounds like at night out here? The scrape scrape scraping of mechanical pencils on a desk?  

My mom’s cousin’s husband used to be a preacher out here. He died of a heart attack apparently after sketching “I walk through the valley of the shadow of death” in the margins of his bible. “We were JUST there!” I thought as a nine year old creeped out by whatever Bill sketched in his Bible. 

I looked at our cat. We had gotten her from Bill and my mom’s cousin Theresa. The cat was still so small. Not much bigger than the day we got her. We piled in the car and drove all the way to Hermleigh to play at my cousin’s house. We played and played all day and when the sun started going down and the sky was purple my brother and sister and I huddled with our cousins on the front porch just hoping my mom would take them up on their offer to give us a kitten. 

The silver screen door glided open on its hinges. The brown hollow core farm house door creaking lightly behind. My dad and mother stepped out with that little black kitten. I can still see the silhouette of my mother holding that kitten above her face and nuzzling it nose to nose. She wanted to name her Jenny Cat. Jenny Cat climbed from kid to kid in the dark car as we sped back to Lubbock. Those stars just scattered across the sky. 

It was my second cousin then, Alana, the first in our family to master dial up, who showed me how to join chat groups for grown ups. Thanks to her I saw my first dick. The man was naked, tan and sitting with his erection in his hand. The massive image we could barely take in took up the whole email. Or maybe that was when they lived in Shallowater.   

I see that green little sign pointing the way to Hermleigh. There weren’t windmills like this back then but there were tumbleweeds.

I’ve hated Lubbock for so long. Why does this place suddenly feel like home? It feels so much like my mother, my father and my grandmother, my 37 cousins, my aunts and uncles. It's full of people I can’t outrun, even when I try, because their faces look like mine, because my voice sounds like theirs. My strength came from them. Came from out here in the desert. Came from out here in the wind. In the dry heat, singing hymnals at the farm. 

My hair and eyes have grit in them as I climb back into the truck. I suddenly want to come back. 

I'm starting to get a sneaking suspicion - I don't know what that means yet - that maybe this is my starting place for telling this story.