Wind, whine, winding down

I envy the little girl invited to play the ratchet in preschool music class. She gets to make the sound of winding a clock before the group sings "Hickory Dickory Dock".  Other kids ring finger cymbals when the song clock strikes the hours. In my own kindergarten career I was always assigned the red rhythm sticks, never the tambourine or triangle. Ah, but there's the whole root of my low self-esteem! My Sunday routine is upset by the strong, cold wind. No walk, no visit to a nature preserve to take photos, just staying bundled up, but unrelaxed. The wind sounds make it difficult to unwind.

In the night the wind wound its way into my dreams until I was deep in a basement of broken, whining washing machines. The cycle selector knobs had fallen into the overloaded tubs and become trapped in knotted bedsheets. More agitating, a huge, peculiar appliance resembling a kiln was overheating and glowing like hot lava. At any moment the basement walls might cave in on all of us--me, my former in-laws, my current students, and a large cast of repairmen.

A friend dreamed of fixtures instead of appliances. She was trapped in a public restroom while the wind piled a sand dune against the only way out. Same wind, same subterranean entrapment, but perhaps different repairmen!



Awoke cold, with "June is Busting Out All Over" stuck in my head. I hadn't noticed Rodgers and Hammerstein hiding behind the water heater furnace in the nightmare basement:



March went out like a lion 

A-whippin' up the water in the bay. 

Then April cried and stepped aside, 

And along came pretty little May! 

May was full of promises, 

But she didn't keep 'em quick enough for some, 

And a crowd of Doubtin' Thomases 

Was predictin' that the summer'd never come. 

The news is weird:

• The map of the world in the lobby of Love Field as Southwest Airlines gears up for the end of the Wright Amendment.
• Oscar Mayer weinermobile visits Firewheel Mall.
• A 60' x 26' catamaran constructed of 2-liter plastic bottles is arriving in Dallas.
• A freeze warning is in effect for tonight.
• Just saw the first monarch butterfly of the spring battling the wind through the soapberry branches out back.
• A socket wrench is also known as a ratchet.

• Rachet instruments were used by British policemen to summon assistance, and by WWII armies to warn of the presence of poison gas (according to Wikipedia).

March either comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb, or the other way round. This is not nearly as reliable as "Thirty days hath September" or "i before e". Today the lion and the lamb have pulled a chair to the sunniest spot in the living room to watch Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel in "The Producers" after they ironed all my shirts.

Now I've wound up this post, but I'm still wound up. Words are so weird, but wind makes me crazy.

Thanks to Steve Weiss Music for the ratchet photo.

© 2013 Nancy L. Ruder