Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

Wind

The wind was strong today. It charged, shifted, and swirled inside my hair. Now that the rains are gone, the lawns look green whichever side one is on. The wind has taken over though.

If something scrapes against you, it has to have shape; right? But does it always have a shape? Logically, it should, but then, the shape of the wind must be hidden from the eyes.

I felt as if I were caught in the wind’s flow, like a kite. Just a little bit more push, I could fly...and this was only when I walked on the driveway to take the mail from the mailbox.

After that, we went to the beach.

Now, this was something. Bubbles popped from the waves and were absorbed by the sand. Where waves did not bother to rush to and wet, the sand blew all around us. Rip tide warnings were up, too.

I thought the shape of the wind and the shape of the waves had to be related somehow. Both curled and ran, then rose and pitched to attack. The waves and foam attacked the sand, and the wind charged at people, trees, and my hair. A woman lost her scarf in the wind, which ended up at my face. She was lucky; I caught it. We all got a laugh out of it; although no one heard what anyone said. All sound was carried away by the wind, the prima donna singer who silenced everyone else.

What does the wind mean? What do the waves mean? These questions came to mind. Could they be foreshadowing something, something about the end, something about the seas rising and hurricanes sweeping this beach in a few months, a few years, or a few decades? Or did they mean something concerning the deep and the high circling each other?

Prattling aside, I think today’s wind was what they called a near-gale wind since white foam from breaking waves was getting blown in streaks and the sea was heaping up. Still it had no fury; it was just ecstatically playful. And it did have its own kind of song, as the poet said.

Wind Song

LONG ago I learned how to sleep,
In an old apple orchard where the wind swept by counting its money and throwing it away,
In a wind-gaunt orchard where the limbs forked out and listened or never listened at all,
In a passel of trees where the branches trapped the wind into whistling, “Who, who are you?”
I slept with my head in an elbow on a summer afternoon and there I took a sleep lesson.
There I went away saying: I know why they sleep, I know how they trap the tricky winds.
Long ago I learned how to listen to the singing wind and how to forget and how to hear the deep whine,
Slapping and lapsing under the day blue and the night stars:
Who, who are you?

Who can ever forget
listening to the wind go by
counting its money
and throwing it away?

Carl Sandburg