Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I.
But when the trees bow down their heads,
The wind is passing by.
***
In first and second grade, I was petrified of the wind. We were living in Japan and were subject, from time to time, to some pretty fierce storms. I learned about typhoons during the typhoon season; every house in our little compound had big metal shutters that slid over the windows and shut out all light. Once, when I was in first grade, a blizzard sent us home from school early. The two teachers assigned older students to each of us younger ones, and we made our way slowly home, blind and terrified, clinging to someone’s hand. I remember looking out over what had been our kickball/soccer/baseball field, and seeing only great curving sheets of snow.
Jeff Thomas was a year or two older than me and a notorious liar. During recess he told me stories of winds that could lift houses from their foundations and trees from the ground. I had felt my house shake with wind only somewhat weaker than this: why should his stories not be true?
***
When the wind blows trees that are in full leaf, the trees look as though they are under water. Their leaves fold and bend like the fronds of sea algae. The trees themselves sway and bend; they seem so willing to go; they will be twisted and pulled whichever way; they whisper and talk and shout their assent. And when the wind passes, and the trees right themselves, and their branches lie still and their leaves lie flat, the trees seem not a little disappointed.
***
I was not afraid of the wind in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh has lots of hills; Pittsburgh is made of hills. Tornadoes find little purchase on such a landscape, and in Pittsburgh, we never had a typhoon. I learned not to be afraid of many things in Pittsburgh.
***
Whenever the moon and stars are set,
Whenever the wind is high,
All night long in the dark and wet,
A man goes riding by.
Late in the night when the fires are out,
Why does he gallop and gallop about?
***
I love to be in bed on a windy night. It’s almost as good as a thunderstorm, if not better, to hear the wind whipping around the house, to hear it banging on things, or knocking the garbage can over. I like to lie there and listen to it, and to know that I am safe and warm and on the inside.
***
Whenever the trees are crying aloud,
And ships are tossed at sea,
By, on the highway, low and loud,
By at the gallop goes he.
By at the gallop he goes, and then
By he comes back at the gallop again.
***
We had a lot of wind in March. The mornings started quietly enough, but by mid-day the wind was kicking up the dust all around our school buildings. Everett’s class, finishing a unit on air and aeronautics, took kites and paper airplanes out into the schoolyard. I wasn’t there to see it, but I was told that the wind was having fun with them: it was snatching the kites off their strings!
One afternoon I called William and Everett from the playground– it was time to go home. William reluctantly broke away from a football game in which the wind was an eager third party. Everett climbed down from the playground structure, his hair whipping around his head. A cloud of dust blew across his path, and then he was blowing toward me.
We didn’t leave school as early as I’d hoped. I am forever getting caught up in conversations; the children always want to stay longer, and on Mondays I have to make another stop and pick up Emma Grace from where she is playing at a friend’s house.
We were days away from spring break that afternoon, and conversations had often hinged on where people would be spending their vacations. Many of my students would be flying off somewhere, and I was reminded– by virtue of their destinations– of the financial security that many of our students’ families enjoy: Colorado, Arizona, California, and more exotic: Asia, Europe. They were off, so many of them, airborne to a week of rest far from home.
***
The trees remain rooted, but they are, at the same time, utterly taken with the wind. Whatever they can move, they do move: the slightest breath will make the leaves quiver; one gust, and they abandon all decorum. They are like girls being flirted with, or like a woman ravished. When the wind comes, there is nothing but the wind: there is only wind and the trees’ answering laughter. They would let go, if they could. They would let the wind take them if it weren’t for those roots coiled and coiled in the earth.
***
We were delayed getting home that afternoon by a school bus. It stopped on a hill, and the sun was picking out the branches of the trees and the manicured hedges of a low-income neighborhood. I felt a sudden impatience: I had been patient with the boys, patient with the conversations, patient with Emma Grace as she pulled her shoes on. And now this school bus with its flashing lights and stop sign was, slowly and one at a time, releasing children to this neighborhood apartment complex with its cheap siding and foreshortened windows.
***
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O uncontrollable!
***
And then I noticed the children themselves. The smaller ones seemed to have emerged first, and now the bigger ones were making their unhurried way across the road. Dark heads emerged from the collars of uniformly colorful coats; the children walked in pairs and in packs; they reminded me of flotsam and jetsam snagged in a stream and then suddenly tugged loose, so that they continued to drift across to the lawn. And here I watched as they fanned out, loosened and blown by the wind. They were blown and separated from one another and into the arms– some of them– of mothers who stood waiting for them on the blacktop.
We drive past that neighborhood twice a day, and I never go by without thinking of those children being blown home from school.
***
Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.
***
I’ve heard explanations of what makes wind. Something about the change in temperature, right? and so a change in air pressure. Wind is, in short, a balancing out of the air, or something like that. So why, then, do I find it so utterly unbalancing? Why does wind seem to me like anything but normal weather? And why does it gust like that? And why is it so invisible? Does it have fingers, so that it can stir the surface of the water here, but leave that other part alone? What is it shaped like, that it should move this branch over here and that one over there and leave these– this time– so utterly still? And why, if it is merely weather, and lacks both sentience and intellect, does it like to play– sometimes too rough?
***
When I was teaching in Pittsburgh, part of the spelling curriculum was Latin roots. It was here that I learned of the word spirare, which is Latin for “to breathe.” The root shows up in words like “conspiracy,” and “respiration” and also “spirit.” And I remember being Quite Taken with this idea, because when God created man, according to the Genesis account, he breathed life into him: and there he was, Adam, a man with a spirit.
Yes, I was Taken with this Latin verb, right there in my classroom on the second floor of the South Fayette Junior/Senior high school. Maybe this wind we’ve got blowing around isn’t so much weather after all. Maybe it’s Breathing, a righteous exhalation, a Life-giving wind that comes around from time to time to remind us of things.
Who’s to say?
***
“He makes his angels winds, his servants flames of fire.” Hebrews 1:7
many thanks to robert louis stevenson and percy bysshe shelley, whose writings make an appearance in this post.
