Who is Lincoln to a five-year-old?

I had a dream of a playing card when I was but five years old.  It was not a face card (though it did have a face), but I cannot remember the number.  Five appeals to me at the moment, echoing my age.  Makes little difference, four, seven, ten.  Makes no difference at all.  

Because...    

The captivating aspect of this card was not its denomination but rather the art on the back, a simple, attractive, yet not sentimental painting of President Lincoln.  Classically seated--head and shoulders--turned in three quarter view, he was shiny black angles superimposed over some imagined green wall.  The artists scrawl, as expected, was a shrinking credit in the card's lower right corner.  

It strikes me now, that Lincoln must have been wearing his hat.

It was the dismal days of early Spring.  Mud had bubbled up where there had been snow.  The ground was wet, yet probably not enough.  And the wind was singeing the dream with earaches and (silly) rumors about the Air Force Base.  The gray sky, debased and churning, was searching for rain in every pocket of every coat; the sky seemed closer than heaven. I could fall into it, or be carried up by the tentacles of those winds.

I was standing beside my father in the garden.  I was waiting to walk the furrows with him.  I had a bag of eyes, unblinking  bits of potato to put back in the Earth.  I would crouch like a toddler and toss the sprouted doubts and hopes into the chasm he had carved out with one thrust of the shovel.  The spud would barely slip from my fingers and the dirt would cascade into the hole.

A strange breeze was wrestling the rows of pines that, like loyal guardians, stood off the incessant winds that came from the north and the west.  Like a deer with ankle twisted in barbed wire, the wind  signed and wailed as it tore at the restriction.  Persistent, rattling the cage, we were protesting the invisibility of God.  Eventually, every one of  us--deer and wind and father and son--would be set free.

I would grow up thinking of the wind as more force than phenomena.  As it pushed past the imperfect wall of those green barriers, it appeared to be looking for me.  Then, the reckless breeze made a strange turn before getting tangled in the branches of the still bare cottonwoods.  Gravity, in that moment, exhaled and all the pieces of the world seemed lighter:  the bag of potatoes, the rotting apples still clinging to the trees in the orchard, my father--a big man--in dungarees leaning on a shovel.

As if emerging from a flock of birds, black against the gray, the object was mostly silhouette twisting in descent.  There was something purposeful and prescient in its journey, slow motion.  It grazed the sky that tickled the sloping roof of a run-down storage shed as it came.  Automatically, my hand reached up, above my head, and the card landed between my fingers.  Landed, it could not be said that I caught it, nor that I held it.  For just as I registered the noble name that fit those craggy features, there was a gusting puff of air that carried the card up, up, and away.