The Sound of Windmills

Set in North Texas, in the thirties and forties, THE SOUND OF WINDMILLS is a story of survival, especially of the females in the Taylor family. Drawing from her background, the story centers mainly around the young girl Rugene Taylor, who grows up where hundreds of windmills dotted the landscape, groaning and creaking as they turned into the wind, pumping water from the wells below ground. Awakening to hear them in the night, a man could rest easy, knowing the storage tanks would be filled by morning, the cooking and baking completed, the wash pots filled, and the Saturday night baths taken. The cattle and horses could belly up to the stock tank and drink their fill of the cool liquid. The sound of windmills was the sound of life. The story ends in Portland, Oregon, where Rugene is teaching at Seton University and writing books. Grieving for her mother's death, Rugene flees to the farm in Texas. As she walks the fields, she sees clearly for the first time that she has been trying to live out her daddy's dreams. As much as she admired her daddy, it was her mother who knew the most about living and dying. The windmills are gone. Only the wind remains. When Henry James wrote The Portrait of a Lady, critics said he left the story up in the air at the end. "The whole of anything is never told," he observed, "you can only take what groups together."