Windless Day!

       Another windless day  brought me back to a childhood memory from 1948.  The farm of my childhood bordered U.S. Highway 81. One can drive from Winnipeg Canada to Mexico City on that road. In the summer of 1948 the highway was being rebuilt. We boys would walk to the highway to watch the men doing the construction. A couple of incidents of that time stick in my mind.

    One of the men approached me and offered me a cigarette. When that was refused he offered me a chew of tobacco which was also refused. Then came an offer of a stick of chewing gun and, of course, that was accepted. But that wasn't the windless day memory.

   Water in our farm yard had two sources. For use in the house rainwater on the roof of the house was caught in the eve troughs. It was filtered through charcoal and stored in two large, underground, cisterns. From there it was accessed in the house with a hand pump.

   Livestock water came from a deep well. A 65 foot tall windmill was used to pump water into the stock tank. While the house waster was as soft as rain the well water was very hard. On a windless day one of the men from the road construction came to the yard for drinking water. He refused cistern water, insisting on well water. But, because there was no wind, the windmill wasn't pumping. His solution? He climbed to the top of the windmill and attempted to turn the wheel by hand.  Not surprisingly that didn't work. Memory fails if he accepted cistern water. 😀

Takk for alt,

Al

We have a picture of my father standing on the shaft that holds the vane, between it and the wheel. It must have been a windless day.