The Wind

The table turns, slow and steady, in front of me, its self-revolutions like those of the Earth. Dishes make their rounds. If the table was the Earth, then we, this family, would be the only people on it.

Sometime in elementary school I learned that the Earth spins at roughly a thousand miles an hour. When the teacher said that, I closed my eyes and tried to imagine it. The classroom that I pictured in my head began to spin in a whirlwind, picking up speed. I thought I could feel myself being folded into the wind. I pictured my spinning around the Earth like sprinting down the arches of Saturn, so long it seemed never-ending, not even at the horizon. When I opened my eyes, though, everything was so still. I realized then that, until I could go up into space and see the Earth spinning from God’s perspective, I could only feel Earth’s endless movement by searching for it within myself.

The wind does not carry us out of the sky because of gravity plastering us to the ground. I think often about what tenuous gravity keeps us, this family, tethered to this Earth which only we populate.

Sixteen million people were relocated out of cities to support rural development from 1966 to 1968 when the Cultural Revolution was in its infancy. My mother told me once at bedtime that she ran away from home one night to her aunt’s house, a shabby dormitory in the rural school she was teaching in. As the sun rose over the mountains the next morning, her aunt led her back home. Petulant, she did not meet her mother’s eyes as she swept my mother up into an embrace, reprimanding and crying at the same time.

Of course, when my mother slipped out of the front door with water and cold bread, she knew she would come back very soon, as all one-night runaways do. But I don’t think my mother knew what name to give the warmth she felt upon her return, even though her mother grounded her for two whole days. To be grounded must’ve seemed the very manifestation of this gravity pulling her back home.

I have, too, considered running away at times, but never seriously. There is another wind within me, kicked up by the spinning of the smaller Earth of this table. It tickles me and whittles away at my resolution, which was weak to begin with. Because of this wind, I always know I will come back the way I went. The wind of the real Earth calms when I open my eyes and put my hand to the wall and feel its stillness. But the wind of the small Earth is always blowing. I find wisps of it in me, but I also see the wind, scattering us as we head to our own cars at the end of dinner. The restaurant has turned off the lazy susan. The wind blows, stolen by the wheels as we speed off in different directions, spooling us back together come next year.