Windmills and Cornfields

One year ago I had the adult responsibility of driving from Chicago to Indianapolis on the occasion of the death of my father. I hadn't made that drive in more than 20 years, but it was one I could do without GPS and without much thought.  The stretch of land between Chicago and Indiana was flattened by glaciers marching south one foot a day, about 16,000 years ago.
I can't remember how to get voice mail off my phone but I remember this nugget. My brain is so bizarre.
The view south has been unchanging for my entire life with huge swaths of farmland as you head south, more industrial Gotham landscapes as you head north. The farmland was what brought our family there after the revolutionary war. Every time I have ever made that drive I've been cocooned in that familiar comfortable feeling of home. I'm with my tribe, these flatlanders are mine.
As I drove last year, however, in northern Indiana I was amazed at what I saw - WIND TURBINES.

There were hundreds, maybe thousands dotting the landscape across the northern land of Hoosiers on either side of interstate 65. I stopped for gas and walked out to the edge of a fence to see what they were like.

What were they like? They were like magic. They sing. Perhaps hum is more appropriate. I stood there listening to them, watching them creak and turn in the wind and thinking how amazing it was that something like this had cropped up across these fields.

I wondered if my Dad had ever seen them. He would've thought that they were really amazing. His childlike wonder with things like this could be very endearing.

I have had intermittent moments of sadness and brief tears for my dad. It feels unfair, unkind, that I wouldn't keen and mourn for him as I did my mom. Sometimes I feel like it's because Mom's death was so unfair, so preventable, and there was a FIX and she was denied it because she was too weak for it. But Dad's world unraveled so fast and terribly after January of 2015 that truly, most of the year my heart knew it would've been better for him to have dropped dead from the heart attack.

It was what he would have preferred to be certain.

365 days ago exactly I stood beside a plowed under field, next to a gas station, and felt wonder at how amazing the world can be. When there were such beautiful things in the world as windmills that sing across the farmlands of northern Indiana there was no way for me to feel despair or lost in the world.

Nearly every day since has been like this. Not every one. But many of them. The future is an amazing place and I'm looking forward to everything. Especially the singing windmills.