Last January I was walking through town with a friend of mine on one of the coldest days so far. The sun was no sanctuary from the cold and its reflection atop the snow blinded us in a white light. We knew the wind was coming, we could hear it. When it got to our backs it lifted us up off our feet and pushed us this way and that like ragdolls afloat on a frozen river. The wind moved so quickly and violently we had to yell from a foot away or else our voices would be carried away by the winter. When it finally abated and we heard its tail race past a far away grove of trees we had to pause red-faced and panting. It hadn't been pleasant and it felt as though our flesh had been stolen away leaving nothing but ice-creamed skeletons bundled up inside winter wool.
I remember telling my friend right then how disparate it was that we should hate the wind so passionately in the gray months from November until March and love it so tenderly when it prophesizes a summer thunderstorm. How is it that such a power, a force not contigent on anything but the skies, should have such two starkly contrasting personalities? Shouldn't it be as steadfast as the sun, aren't their powers drawn from the same space? But, of course, the sun has never been so stalwart. What does the sun give us in the winter besides a brief glimmer of its future glory?
This summer I walked with the very same friend in the minutes before a storm. The day had been hot and it was one of those times we actually thanked our sweat for its cooling properties and didn't scorn its lecherous discharge as uncomfortable and sticky. What did we notice first I wonder, that the sweat had dried on our forearms or that a light breeze had started the weather vanes atop the New England houses to stir? Likely we noticed the descending gray before everything else. What was a slight refreshing breeze morphed into spontaniously combusting wind currents almost immediately. The darkness darkened and the wind quickened and the weather vanes grew angrier and all of a sudden I couldn't hear my friend yell. It was upon us and we ran, we ran with the wind wherever it led and where it led us was into a circle and it was in a circle we were running when the rain came down not one drop then another drop and another, but all at once as if the sky were a giant water tower tipped over by God. We found shelter beneath a tree and laughed and I reminded my friend of that other wind and how different they were. How this one made us open our arms as if they were angel wings greeting the heavens and how the other made us curl into balls of warmth into which we could retreat from the atmospheric onslaught.
Why are they so different the winds then and the winds now? Is it us who changes or is it the wind who can't keep temperate? Is it possible to consolidate the wind's extremes into one or is that akin to defining an individual by a single emotion? Would we ever want to? Is it not better that the wind knows every point on the spectrum, from the very ends to very middle, so that we, the beneficiaries, might appreciate the better points most? Would we run in circles carved by the wind if we were certain they would come every day? Would we have anything to look forward to if every day we were frozen ragdolls, playthings of the air?
Today there is a fall wind, simple and strong. Not cold nor warm but moving and spirited. Fly it says, not violently and thrashing, but smoothly and relaxed. But do it now, it pleades, do it now and today because I won't be here tomorrow and it'll never be the exact same.
