I went to the Women’s Cancer Writing group today. I haven’t been there since last spring. I have no idea what possessed the group leader to call the Freedom House but she found me. Luckily, P still gives my cell phone number on his outgoing message.

The facilitator suggested that we write first of wind for 15 minutes. Then she wanted us to contextualize the wind. This is what I came up with:

Wind

The wind is the goddess. I don’t have to see her to believe in her. I can feel her presence all around me: whipping through my hair, brushing over my skin, gusting up the pleats of my skirt.

Wind is my religious experience. This small blue planet and the galaxy that holds it is my church. Oh, sure. I go to a building every Sunday and connect with beloved community but that’s not my real church. My real church has majestic redwoods and crashing surf. It has the song of birds floating over Walden Pond and the pulse of jackhammers reverberating off massive concrete buildings near the TransAmerica. In my church, the wind is everywhere, all at the same time.

Sometimes I can barely tell that she’s there. As I gaze onto the water from the hammock at our River House, the birch leaves flutter and I can hear just one note, maybe two, from the wind chimes; on a hot summer day, a welcome breeze makes the pale pink curtains rustle against the sill while I write at my desk in Cambridge. 

Sometimes she brings beautiful gifts. She makes acres and acres of wheat dance across the Midwestern plain, making that long, cross-country drive a little less tedious; she dries five dozen diapers in one winter day, making them list sideways out on the clothesline behind the farmhouse in upstate New York.

And sometimes, my favorite times, she humbles me by her dynamic, electrifying energy. I am in awe of the fiercesome force that churns the treetops of even the mightiest oaks; I am stung by her piercing power as she rushes past me, howling through skyscraper corridors in my first urban hurricane. Swaying, swirling, dancing and driven.

This power, her power, can make just about everything bow down eventually. She is scary. And, yet, she is comforting too. You see, sometimes I think I am in control. I think, somehow, that I have a say in how things will turn out. Her reminder that this notion of control is all an illusion is comforting. I need that force to rattle me awake.

“Hello?!” she cries out to me. “You are but a tiny, tiny part of the interdependent web.”

So there she is. She pushes storm clouds across continents and oceans. She cools me down in sweltering heat. She carries birds and butterflies and ladybugs and locusts on her way around the world. She snaps towering pines, messes up my hair, makes ripples across the pond at sunset and has blown my trashcan clear into the neighbor’s yard more than a few times.

All I can do is watch, listen, feel. All I can do is be amazed.

The wind is the goddess. Sometimes she’s gentle, sometimes she is challenging. She is always moving, always there, whether I can see her or not.

Wind in Context 1

I don’t remember her name, but she was so cute. How could I resist the offer of a ride in the countryside? I hadn’t been off festival land for weeks. I hopped on the back of her Suzuki 650 and left my leather jacket open so that I could feel the warmth of her back against the warmth of my chest. I held on tight as the air rushed into our helmets and flapped our clothing. We slowed down after a while and stopped at an abandoned farmhouse.

We dared each other to go inside and were rewarded by faded pink rose wallpaper and a baby’s wooden high chair. There were a couple of bottles and a fork on the table in the corner. Clearly, the last time this kitchen held the aroma of glazed ham and sugar cookies was in 1952. The brittle calendar told us that much. The rest seemed like such a mystery.

We stood there together, Cute Girl and I, looking out the broken glass window over the enamel sink. We wondered who had lived here? Why did they leave? Why did no one replace them?

Outside, the breeze blew across the alfalfa fields, making all of the stalks bend to the left, and then, suddenly, shifting to the right. I shifted too. I leaned against the pale pink silverware drawer to face her, the pitted chrome handle poking into my hip. What I really wanted was for her to kiss me. But the wind changes so fast and what I can see in one moment is gone in the next.

“We had better get back to the land,” she said. “They’re gonna wonder where we are.”

“Oh.” A sigh escaped before I had a chance to check it. “Right. Of course.”

I turned away from the window and headed for the unhinged door, stirring the dust as I walked. But only just a little.

Wind in Context 2

I wanted him to know early on that the world is an exciting place. And so it was that I stood in the doorway on a hot, summer night with my two-month-old son. As soon as I opened the kitchen door, the wind rushed in, bringing with it a steady dose of fat hard raindrops.  The lightning flashed across the wide sky, illuminating the deep purple and grey storm clouds. The thunder rumbled and crashed, shaking the deck, waking my senses. I felt so alive!

“V! What the hell are you doing? Get out of there! It’s dangerous! You two could get struck by lightning, “ WW has never thought it wise to stand in a storm.

I was undeterred and the baby just blinked. So what if we got a little wet?

I wanted to teach him to face a storm head on, with courage and audacity. I didn’t want him to have to overcome the fear that others tried to pass on to me as a child. Our landlady, Mary, was a very superstitious Portugese woman. When a storm came, she was frantic. She ran around like a mother hen in her flowered housedress and her worn slippers, big arms flailing and screeching orders to all the tenants. She insisted that my mother come up from our basement apartment and bring us to the third floor. So there we were, all huddled together, under her kitchen table. The red-checkered tablecloth was our fort for the duration of the storm. I had to settle for the muffled sound of rain battering against the firmly closed windows but, oh! How I longed to run out naked and dance on the hot patio stones.

I looked at my son and smiled. He looked back at me, safely nestled in my arms.

“Together, we can withstand anything,” I told him. I had no idea then how important that lesson would become.