An angel whose spinning arms played a harp
- " The whirligig's figure could simply be a harp player. The harp was full-sized, the sort you'd find in an orchestra. Lea had played in an orchestra."(P 51 )
- "Brent'd begun referring to the whirligig by her name and almost felt he was reassembling her broken body, reviving her. "(P 51)
- " Then he spied a tree limb, roughly horizontal, open to the wind from the west and high enough to keep his work out of reach. He climbed out and nailed down the driftwood mount. Then he returned for the whirligig."(P 53)
A whale whirligig that Lea's face in it's belly
- He made up his mind to vault ahead from the simplest style he'd built in Washington and decided on the spouting whale, operated by a propeller and rods.
- He sketched the whale on wood, erased, revised, then realized Lea wasn't in it. He considered giving the whale her face, then printing her in its belly as Jonah.
The wooden band
- The whirligig featured a drummer,a trumpet player, a clarinetist, and a man with a trombone. It was a leap beyond the spouting whale, with more figure, a six-bladed propeller, and a much more complex system of rods and pivots that made the instruments dip and rise as if the musicians were marching.(P 93)
- He decided to make Lea the clarinetist, painstakingly sawed out the figure......(P 94)
- The red-jacketed band stirred to life. The first musician raised his trumpet. The trombone dipped. The drumstick rose. Lea lowered her clarinet. It had been Brent's idea not to have their instruments rise and fall in unison. The staggered motion gave it a more exciting rhythm.
The fourth whirligig
- The last whirligig was three times the size of the others Brent'd built. On the blades of one four-bladed model he'd painted Lea's four-part name. He considered the plywood rendition of her face. It was the most faithful of the four he'd made. For the first time, he'd given her a slight smile, painstakingly copied from her photograph. The head was large, giving him room to glue sea glass and red reflectors in her hair. her skin glistened. Because it was Maine, he'd given the wood an extra coat of varnish. He'd drilled holes in the shells and made her a necklace, hanging it over her head along with a set of wind chimes he'd rescued from the dump.(P 125)
