The view was breathtaking. To the west was our little hardscrabble oil and ranching community. To the east was the vast expanse of the sourthern edge of the Llano Estacado. Above and all around was a luminous aqua sky dotted with white puffy clouds. The air was clean and light as a feather.

I was five years old. I had climbed up to the platform atop the windmill at the back of our property. I really don’t know how I managed this.

There was a two-lane paved road that led east in Texas. I could see it inch its way along until it seemed to over the edge of the earth. There was little traffic. I would occasionally see a car or two and sometimes a truck coming toward town or leaving. The vehicles looked like ants moving in their orderly and busy way.

Back toward town there was a black top road that ran toward me. The paving expired before it got to our place, finishing as a dirt road.

Eventually a particular vehicle caught my attention. It was still far away, but I could tell that it was Dad’s truck. It was coming my way.

Mild curiousity floated across my mind. What was he doing? Was he coming home? Why?

And then he was there. He turned onto our property, drove the short distance up the unpaved trace, parked and got out. He didn’t seem in any hurry, and he didn’t head into the house. As a matter of fact, he did what he did most times when he came home from work.

He ambled around the backyard, where he and my Mom were working to encourage grass to make a stand against the sand and weeds that thought the land belonged to them.

He took his pocketknife and dug up the roots of the big grass burrs that proliferated. He would walk around cutting these things out of the ground, holding them carefully in his left hand until he had a kind of grass burr bouquet. Then he would go over and deposit them in the trash can at the back of the property.

He would return to work until he had another collection in his hand. This would go on for 30 minutes or so. It was a kind of decompression ritual. When he was finished he would go inside where my Mom would meet him with a cup of coffee.

But that is what he did at the end of the day. Here we were, a long way before noon, and I was peering down watching him digging grass burrs just like he did in the evenings.

I was puzzled. I sat on the edge of the platform at the top of the windmill watching my Dad as he moved quietly and deliberately. This was very interesting because I had never seen this activity from such a height or perspective.

I didn’t call down to him, and he didn’t seem to know I was there. Eventually, though, he looked up at me. “Well, hi, Shorty,” he said, a bit surprised.

Then his head went bacck down and he went on with his work. My attention moved back and forth between my Dad and the broad vista around me. I was torn: I always wanted to be with my father, but the view was fantastic. I’d never seen anything like it.

Dad began to gather a little bit of trash and some twigs to add to the barrel where the grass burrs were being collected. From time-to-time he would burn all the refuse, and I would ‘help’ by going around the yard and picking up other miscellaneous items as he tended the fire.

When I realized where this process was going, I swung my leg over the platform onto the first rung and started down. A fire was the final incentive.

He seemed to hardly notice that I had climbed down the windmill. He just went about getting the fire started in the barrel. I started picking up random twigs, and an old brown paper sack that had blown into the yard.

Wordlessly, I walked up to heave the items into the fire. I waited for his go ahead as usual. Fire safety was an important lesson I had learned.

“Toss it in from over there,” he said, gesturing toward the north side of the barrel so that I would be up wind of the flames.

As I was doing this, he stepped over to the ladder that ran up the entire length of the windmill. He reached up, and with his hand struck the inside of the 1″x12″ that served as a rung. Off it came. He followed suit until all the steps on the ladder were gone up to the top of his head.

He took the pieces of wood that had served as rungs and stacked them together. He had dismantled the low end of the ladder discreetly but quickly. And tending to the fire was consuming my attention.

“We’ll let that fire die down. I just wanted those grass burrs to get burned up,” he said, gesturing toward the fire. “Let’s get a hammer and get these nails out of these boards. This is good wood. We can use it for something else.”

When we were finished, the wood was stacked neatly inside the shed. The nails we had removed were separated into two small piles. One pile contained the handful of nails that were straight enough or could be straightened for reuse. The others were set aside to be discarded altogether.