Wind

It’s the windy season now. My own private “Mistral” both in and outside my head. The wind here isn’t so bad as it is in other parts, like the valley where I grew up or the town higher up in the same valley (where the wind could pluck a chicken clean if you held it out the kitchen window for a moment or two)…

I digress. Spring weather here is nothing short of enthusiastic. It is also very easily distracted. It is also brutally, incessantly windy for days at a time and then warm and soft and perfectly amicable in drunken, delirious stretches of time inbetween.

It’s windy in my head too. I’m bursting with ideas. Extra chapters for my book. Plans for the trip. Things I haven’t done and things I should stop trying to convince myself I’m ever going to do. Solutions for problem areas of the house or back yard. Inventions for mass transit and the most curious little theories involving mass spectrometry and hydrogen bonding. I get a lot done when my head is windy like this.

Rather, I get a lot started. I start things. I start lists, I start packing, I start laundry and I start starting. I start starting so many starts that when it’s time to start finishing things I can never see clearly enough to know where to begin. I think about flowers and sunshine and warm naps in the sun and I think about kitten fur and I think about ozone and I think about how horrible my life would be without person A or B having had such an impressive imprint on my personality and life path.

The wind comes in bursts. It roars and rages against the house all night and I can feel the nails in the siding squeal and squirm with discomfort. I can feel the nails in my brain start to wiggle, almost imperceptibly, loose. Cracks appear in the paint. Dust bunnies huddle together in great heaps on the hardwood floors and I can no longer discern if they’re all still just in my head anymore. I can’t jostle them loose anymore. It’s windy in my head and all of these thoughts and ideas lash themselves at my windows like the giant bursts of sea spray you see in postcards and youtube videos of the coast line in a storm.

This is the windy season. It’s an exciting time, to be sure. But I hate the wind. I miss the cozy quiet of a heavy, damp snowstorm. Nothing moves fast in the snow. Everyone drives slower and water flows more slowly and when the snowflakes hurl them selves at my windows, at most all I can hear is a delicate little SPLAT. Snowflakes like that don’t have this kind of angry, clawing strength. Even the bad snowstorms, the fierce ones, the furious ones, even those snowstorms eventually shudder to a halt and slink, gasping, away after their point has been made.

The wind has come. It stays. Wind lingers. Wind has no pattern, no tempo. Wind does what it wants, when it wants and if you are in the way then it doesn’t matter to the wind one wit. Wind will stay for as long as it pleases and it will tear at the shingles and shout down the exhaust pipes and whisper it's rotten rumors through the bug-screens.

I don’t like the wind.

I don’t like the wind at all.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the wind is much, much stronger than I am. This thought makes me terribly uncomfortable. I’ve been stronger than things for a long time. But this one doesn’t want to budge. It doesn’t follow the rules. Wind doesn’t have time to listen to the rules. It just shouts at me all night. Shouting out memories and ideas and thoughts that need thinking about and many other thoughts which don’t. It claws at the windows and it leans hard on the siding and it dances it's dance in the lawn as it tears at the trees and flowers around it. What does the flower know that I do not? How can the flower be stronger than the wind, and I am not?

The wind has come. It is windy. Inside my head and out.