The Wind Chime

Almost every afternoon for eight years I walked the mile to my brother's house and we would sit at the table on his deck, drinking wine and talking. Sometimes we'd talk about computers, sometimes we'd talk about books we'd read, or tell fishing stories, and sometimes we didn't talk much at all.

“There's a spider hanging from the bill of your cap,” he said one day.

“Yeah I see it,” I said crossing my eyes.

“Maybe that means you're not moving enough.”

“Well, I'm comfortable,”I said, as the spider lowered himself down to my leg and scurried off.

“Hey, where did you get that wind chime that hangs on your apple tree?”

“I made it,” I told him, “If you want, I'll make one for you.”

“Yeah, I liked the sounds it made when we were having our barby at your house the other day.”

The next morning I went out to the shop and sawed some aluminum conduit into various lengths, drilled holes to hang them with yellow cord and tapped on them with a hammer. A couple of them sounded sour so I sawed a little more off until they sounded sweeter. I hung them from a round scrap of wood I'd saved from another project, and in the center I hung a heavy nut and a big washer to bang against the pipes. Below that I tied an old Windows 95 CD to catch the wind. It wasn't pretty, but it sounded good.

I put the contraption in a grocery bag and carried it up to John's that afternoon.

“That was fast!” He said,” Let's hang it up and see how it sounds!”

We hung it from the awning over the center of the table and sat back, sipping our wine and waiting for the wind to blow.

“Sure is calm today, isn't it!”

“Yeah the wind usually picks up about this time, though!”

We sat, sipping and waiting for at least a slight breeze to move things and make some noise but there was no wind at all. We poked it and wiggled it and it sounded good, but it was supposed to be a wind chime.

Finally, a few days later the wind from an incoming storm got it working and it was so loud we had to move it to the end of the deck. It survived year after year through rain and wind, chiming away.

A few weeks after John died I went out on the deck. The table and chairs were stacked for the winter and the deck seemed abandoned and empty. The wind chime was hanging there, weathered, beat up and ugly, but still dinging, bonging and chiming the same old tune.