The Girl in the Swing

In the summer of 1941, little Mozelle (seven and a half; eight in September!) was swinging on the rope swing her daddy had made for her. The swing hung from the branch of an old oak tree, one of only two trees that grew on their West Texas farm. As he’d hung the swing from an accommodatingly low-hanging limb the summer before, Mozelle had smiled broadly up at her father and offered her only commentary on what seemed to her to be the farm’s rather strange shortcoming.

“It’s a good thing we grow wheat and cotton and not trees, huh Daddy?”

Her father had made his living from the earth for as long as he could remember. He was generally a serious, sometimes even a severe, man, but what smiles he had to offer he seemed to save for his youngest and most unexpected child. Now, one of those rare smiles softened the hard-packed lines of his wind-burned face.

“Yup,” he said simply, “reckon it is.”

With that he had tightened the knot of the swing’s rope around the limb with such strength that the sinewy muscles of his powerful arms nearly twanged.

He had nodded to his little girl, and with a shriek of delight she had attacked the simple swing, planting its wooden seat in her belly and pistoning her legs furiously until she had leapt free of the dusty ground and was sailing up, then back, then up again into the cloudless sky above.  

After that, it was the rare afternoon that didn’t find Mozelle running to those two lonely trees and her one inexhaustible source of joy on the farm. On her way there, she ran past her mother’s vegetable garden and around the rim of the small pond that lay just beyond it.

Somehow that tough little pond always managed to have at least a little water in it, even when there wasn’t a drop to be found anywhere else--which had pretty much been the case since before Mozelle had even come into the world. In fact, only in the previous year or so had the rains started to return. Thinking about the way her heart had leapt when her father had smiled at her tree farm joke, she imagined pointing out the pond to her father one day and saying  “It’s a good thing this is a wheat and cotton farm and not a water farm, huh Daddy?” But she invariably forgot her follow-up funny by the time she shuffled back indoors, as tired and dusty from her play as her father ever was from the back-breaking work it took to keep the soil, which had been rendered parched and sickly by almost a decade of Dust Bowl sandstorms and drought, from dying altogether.

It was on that simple swing that young Mozelle planned the long years of life that lay ahead of her. And it was in the extraordinarily beautiful house that she had seen on a trip to visit her sister in Amarillo that all her dreams began--in the house, but not in Amarillo. The only thing she knew more certainly than the fact that she would live in that house someday, was that she did not want to live where this awful sand blew all the time. She would have her castle, but it would be in a land of green and wetness far, far away from the scouring sand storms of the West Texas Dust Bowl where her dreams took shape.

Though the numbers wouldn’t have meant much to her at the time, Mozelle’s dream home was a four-level, neoclassical mansion with over 15,000 feet of floor space, twenty rooms, eight bathrooms and seven fireplaces. This small-town sharecropper’s daughter knew how to dream big. Still, the brick and marble façade, the two-story marble columns flanking the front entryway, the roof-level balcony they supported, and the nearly countless windows with which the mansion looked out upon the world were only just big enough to fill her ambitious young mind. That gorgeous home in Amarillo would one day come to be known as the Harrington House, but in Mozelle’s mind it was hers from the first day she laid eyes on it.