Tilting At Windmills

My mother hates hummingbirds. Actually, that's not true. She loves hummingbirds. Would it be fair to say that she's tired of them? Perhaps. After years of receiving porcelain, wooden, painted, plastic, ceramic, confectionery, realistic, impressionistic, miniature, life-size, giant, spinning, stationary, and any other representation of the tiny creatures that she once shared a porch with in the mountains of Colorado, she's done. Not that she doesn't appreciate those salt shakers, thank you very much.
It's just that everyone she knows has seen fit, over the years, to find her just the right knickknack or remembrance of those days gone by that her house is filled to the rafters with remembrances of those days. Those little birds became her albatross. My father, contrastingly, had a fascination with windmills. It began simply enough with a childhood in Kansas. He grew up around farms, but not on one. He was the son of a mailman, not a farmer. But as he grew older, and brought up children of his own, he pitched a metaphorical tent at the base of a mountain that he liked to imagine was his bucolic upbringing. We, as his children, were never more impressed with this metaphorical past than when he was busying himself around the rocks and woods of our mountain cabin. We had no running water, no indoor plumbing, no electricity. We hauled our drinking water up in ten gallon jugs from the faucets at our home down in town. Or should I say that was part of my father's job. When he made his daily commute to work, he would bring us mail, newspapers and water. Those ten gallon jugs were the chore.
That's why eventually he had a well dug on our property in the hills. It had to be very deep, and we were told that a hand pump would never be sufficient to bring all that fresh water to the surface. An electric or gas pump could have done the job, but suddenly, in the midst of the nineteen-seventies ecological movement, my father had the bright idea to put up a windmill. It would serve the purpose of bringing us water, and reminding him of those bygone days in Kansas. Never mind that with a little more time and thought, it could have been the means to power our lights and appliances. It was a solution.
It was also a project. It was one of my father's projects that became something of a curse. As such, his family and friends began to present him with cards and gifts that had windmills on them. Years passed, and the cap to the well became rusted and the toy windmills continued to appear on birthdays and Christmases. And every summer, he continued to haul those ten gallon jugs up the hill. When my father died, there was no windmill on the well. There was a metal replica that he put together, and that was taken apart and eventually reassembled in my back yard here in California. I was also presented with a smaller, wooden model that had been stuffed to the back of my father's closet and left unopened for years.
A couple of weeks ago, I found that wooden model at the back of my own closet. I took it out and, over the course of a few hours, glued and fit it together. Now I've got two windmills at my house in urban Oakland. Neither one of them pumps water or generates electricity. They both tend to remind me how much my father must have hated windmills.