January 30, 2013

What a difference a day can make!  Yesterday:  gray, humid, soft air, warm, springish.  Today:  clouds vanished by 9 am, windy, cool if not cold, dry air, winterish.   Everywhere the wind is making sounds:  the cane makes a rattling swishing sound, the chaste tree's little twigs clatter, pine trees sigh and moan, and when there is a big gust (and we have had some HUGE ones) the sound of wind itself, when you really understand what they mean when they say an ocean of air.  Wave on wave of sound moving between the houses, out onto the road, making everything move and vibrate its own peculiar song.  Clouds pop up for a moment, bloom like skyflowers, then just as quickly go to seed and vanish.  An enormous one appeared right in front of me, not there one minute, slowly it built up luscious whipped cream heights, then . . . poof!  Vanished just like that, torn apart and swallowed up by the dry wind!  Amazing! 

And what would be more appropriate than a poem about . . . wind! 

Wind 

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
The coal-house door. Once I looked up -
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;
The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons. 

Ted Hughes 

I think our house has felt like that today, "the windows tremble to come in," and our birds too seem to be having trouble with the wind.  A large vulture made a rough landing in the tree they have claimed as they own.  It seemed that is skidded down before it caught a branch and huddled there.  I see a couple of them, dressed in their somber undertaking suits, hunched facing into the wind.  The sun is strong and bright and the sky is the color you think of when you say sky blue.  Empty at the moment of any cloud at all.  When it rained last night, the wind was already strong.  We heard this scrabbling sound, and just having gotten rid of the squirrel that had taken up residence, I was afraid we would have another, but it sounded bigger than a squirrel.  When Mikayla and I went out to look in the beginning of the rain, it was a raccoon that was scrambling there and it took off up the roof and away in the dark.  I heard it a while later come down again, evidently having found no way in.  My husband did a good job of plugging up the holes with tin and foam. 

It's been an interesting morning, even the students were unsettled by the wind I think, more talkative and louder than usual.  I had to remind them several times that it might be our classroom but it was still the library! 

Hope you have a blue sky day, with or without wind.  I am basking in the sunlight and hope it continues for awhile!