Tonight, the boy headed out for dinner with his mom – he’s with me for almost two weeks straight, helping his mom with some classes and work issues and giving me a chance to travel for work on the back end. We both thought a middling break dinner – which ended up being down the street from my house anyway – was a good idea.
I took advantage of the two hour break to have a cigarette. I don’t smoke regularly these days, but every now and again, I have a craving – generally correlated to the level of emotional dysfunction at the mortgage hedge fund. Today I was jonesing.
As I went outside, the wind picked up, just a bit.
For whatever reason, I remember wind more from my childhood than from more recent times. By that I don’t mean that I don’t register wind as I used to, but it seemed just windier growing up. Despite claims of more violent weather in today’s climate change years, I distinctly remember far more days where walking to school, in Cape Elizabeth, and then especially walking from the Radcliffe quad to class at Harvard and working the late shift at Out of Town News involved a battle against the gales of New England. I’d be wrapped in a surplus army jacket, or frantically tying down a tarp guarding the magazines at the newsstand, or feeling the feeking drain from my nose and forehead on the way back from the bar, struggle back at my house or dorm or apartment, and then catch my breath in the still air of a stair landing, realizing that the wind had been ripping it from my lungs until then.
Tonight, as the boy slept, the house went from lovely late winter silence to springtime howl in about ten seconds. The tired plywood of my roof, in desperate need of replacement, screeched for ten or twenty seconds until it decided not to rip away just yet, while the gale continued and the nails decided to hold this one time more.
The dog lifted her head and looked at me, asking if she should worry. I silently told her no.
The boy is asleep. I’m getting up and putting on my jeans, and my too-old jacket, and a touque. I want to feel the wind again. I’m glad it’s back.
And after a cigarette and a walk to the shore, I’m back. Sure enough, the wind has returned. The dog doesn’t like it – just like my lab didn’t like it back when I was a kid – just like we struggled against it on the old battlements at Fort Williams in high school but we still stuck it out, being teenagers in the dark. I missed the wind, and it’s back.
Plus for whatever reason, Prince’s Raspberry Beret was playing on the radio when I came back in. It’s a song about wind in a barn. Perfect.
It’s strong tonight, dessicating and cold. It reminds me of old times, but it’s really just cleansing the newer, older me, and now, back inside, I hear it’s strain against my house, and I am very happy.