Tag Archives: Wind

Big Wind, Big Weather: Everyday Magic, Day 513

Posted on March 7, 2012 | Comments Off

All night, the big wind blows. At times, the whole house seems to lift a little as the wind finds its way through every slat and crack. The trees are rocked hard, the dirt flies in the distance, and the animals sleep unperturbed.

Living in Kansas means living in big weather: large gestures from the sky as change passes through. Yesterday’s 70+ degrees will be tomorrow’s freezing rain. “Nothing lasts,” the weather seems to sing, shout and whisper, but all the same, I love listening to this wind that surges and drops, halts and powers on again.

While big changes can happen any time, there are months when such happenings accumulate to a screeching point, and March is such a month. Whether it’s lamb or lion, elephant or amoeba, March days and nights turn on a dime. Because of our non-winter winter, this March feels especially volatile. Why, there were tornadoes in February, and we’ve already had one prairie burn and may have another one later this week, a month ahead of schedule. Daffodils are springing upward, not yet blooming thankfully, but I did dream of hyacinth in blossom, large and fragrant in their timelessness. Yet the weather — always the weather — can deep-six anything that bursts forth or just lull along as if the air is always quiet and balmy. We never know.

Natalie walks by and tells me, “It’s getting pretty wild out there, Mom.” Yup, it is, the sky preparing itself for a 40-degree drop later today as it reminds us that it’s pretty wild in here too.

Comments Off

Posted in Weather

Tagged ,

Big Wind All Night: Everyday Magic, Day 264

Posted on April 10, 2011 | 2 Comments

The house creaked when the wind blew, coming in waves all night. Occasionally, there was a lull that the coyotes filled with their calls to each other. Occasionally, there wasn’t a lull and that roar wrapped big around us. I slept and woke, feeling at times like I was suspended in the sky. At the same time, I love the big wind, a comforting sound that tells me I’m home, it’s a time of big possibilities and wide-hearted shifts, and that we live in the world of weather.

→ 2 Comments

Posted in Magic

Tagged

What Falls In The Fall: Attack of the Osage Oranges: Everyday Magic, Day 100

Posted on October 26, 2010 | 1 Comment

Sitting on the porch this evening with the heavy and fast wind coming and going, the branches swinging down and back out, and the leaves falling down in tumbles, I kept hearing them: giant thumps around me. No surprise, the Osage Orange trees hugging the woods here are full of Hedge Apples (who says apples and oranges don’t come from the same tree?). They’re big, green, brain-textured and human head-sized. Although I hate scary movies, I love the sound of green brains falling swiftly from the trees.

→ 1 Comment

Tagged ,

Everything Looks Different From the Water: Everyday Magic, Day 40

Posted on August 23, 2010 | 1 Comment

“I’ve gotten to the point where I would rather see places from the water,” Sandy told me on the sailboat yesterday afternoon. “Everything looks different from there.” She was right, I realized, as I looked out to the wooded areas, some slightly hilly, surrounding Perry Lake. For one thing, everything looks different when you get into the cool wind of the moving sailboat, and the August heat dissolves. For another, being in the center of the water makes you feel like you are now officially at the center of wherever you are.

We left the dock about 4, and for the next 4 hours moseyed and sped, leveled calm and tilted quick, across the lake and into a section of it about 12 miles long. I especially liked standing next to the sails, holding onto a line of course, and feeling the breeze continually wash over me.

All in all, it was a magical afternoon, our family graced with this gift from Sandy and Frank, as we sailed through conversations about stem cell research benefits, the latest headlines from The Onion, our kids’ elementary school days (since as the previous 5th and 6th grade teachers to two of our kids, Sandy and Frank had the goods on us), origins of sailing and how the Vikings learned to sail into the wind, the best food of Spain and Costa Rica, Flamenco guitar, flamingos and other pink birds, and how it was we older folks lived our childhoods without hummus.

By the time we got back to land, just after sunset, I felt, although half the ice in the cooler hadn’t even melted away, we were returning from a refreshing vacation, all of us tilted right away by sailing through and with the wind. Thank you, Frank & Sandy!

→ 1 Comment

Posted in Magic

Tagged ,

Death and Cottonwoods: Everyday Magic, Day 10

Posted on July 23, 2010 | 5 Comments

I sit on the back deck in the sun, shade and wind. All I hear is the cottonwood, tall and leaning a little toward the house, the leaves half green, half shine. To my shame, I must admit that in my mind I hear the song “Honey” recorded by Bobby Goldsboro in the 60s (voted on CNN as “worst song of all time”) and its lyrics of “See the tree, how big it’s grown/ But friend, it hasn’t been too long, it wasn’t big.” The song came out in 1968 when I was eight, and I thought it was the best thing I’d heard, excluding all recordings by the Monkees.  And no wonder: this cottonwood volunteered up when we moved here 15 years ago.

I’m digressing, but then again, death will make a gal do that. Mark is gone, and just today I got word from one of my closest friends that her mom, also my friend and a exquisite landscape painter to boot, died after outliving her cancer prognosis by years. One of Joan Foth’s paintings wraps around my book The Sky Begins At Your Feet, but most people know her work from the cover art for William Least-Heat Moon’s Prairyerth. She had a way of seeing the sky particularly that changed how I now see the sky, especially when I’m in the mountains. Joan pointed us toward the horizontal stretches that reach across ranges of rock or the tall expanses of color and movement towering up from the Flint Hills.

What moved me the most, though, was what Joan and I talked about a year or so ago on the phone: the birds and the trees, the wind and the sky — what you can see right out the window when you stop enough to look. She was positively ecstatic about watching, which was a bonus for her in her final years when moving and doing weren’t so easy. The more you watch, the more you stop seeing what you expect and start expanding your perceptions beyond the confines of your thoughts and thinking.

So today, I’m watching the big cottonwood, the wind coming in waves, and the biggest waves so loud and so light-dappling that I can only look up in awe and let it sweep clean whoever I think I am. I’m also saying to both my friends, Mark and Joan, and with no disagreement that “Honey” is probably the worst song ever written, “Honey, I miss you.” Already and always.

Photos: top one is the base of the cottonwood early one spring, middle is my book with Joan’s painting, and bottom is Joan’s painting, “The High Road.”

→ 5 Comments

Tagged , , ,

Surprise of Storm: Everyday Magic, Day Seven

Posted on July 20, 2010 | Comments Off

Driving home this afternoon in the heat, I thought about simply aiming the car west and going back to Colorado. I could be in the mountains in less than nine hours, and that sure seemed to be the only way to escape many days of outrageous heat and crazy humidity. Coupled with the wind, it’s the kind of weather that makes me feel like I feel into a giant dryer each time I exited a building. Once I got home, I actually looked on wunderground.com to see what the temperature was in Chicago, where I could maybe catch a cheap flight although there’s absolutely no reason I even want to leave home now. But hey, when it gets like this, it feels like it will be like this forever.

Weather and emotions: both of them are the prima donna players of our lives. Whatever we feel seems like it’ll last forever — sadness, anger, joy, boredom, and the same is true of intense weather. When the sun is out, it feels like it’ll always be out; when it’s bitter cold, it’s hard to remember anything different. Yet weather and emotions can change on a dime, and they do.

Like right now. As I sit here writing this, the thunder gets louder, the sky gets darker, and the dog tunnels deeper into the closet (she hates storms). The temperature has dropped over ten degrees in less than an hour, the sky smells like rain, and some rain has already begun to fall. I think of walking from the parking lot to the Kansas University Union today with my daughter, Natalie, for a little errand, and how, in the heavy and searing heat, she turned to me and said, “I hate Kansas.” I wanted to say, “No, you don’t; you just hate this weather,” but I knew that both the feeling and the weather would pass. I just didn’t expect it to change so drastically so quickly.

Now I can hear the rain hitting the deck and roof, and especially some tin sheets we’re storing outside my window. The golden and blue-gray light competes, and the cottonwood leaves shake harder. It’s time to stand up, walk to the door and open it to what new sky life has just landed here.

Comments Off

Tagged , ,

The Magic of the Morning After Insomnia: Everyday Magic, Day Six

Posted on July 19, 2010 | 4 Comments

Last night was bad. My brain woke up with a jolt sometime after midnight and wouldn’t be persuaded to go back to sleep or even shut up for hours. Maybe it was so much yoga, caffeine, or heat lately, or just the confluence of the stars, karma, and weather, but it sucked. As my friend Judy once told me, those hours of insomnia are the witching hours when the little concerns morph into deathstar-sized worries. It didn’t help that I was also entertaining some chigger bites in sensitive places (dear readers who don’t know about chiggers, bless you and keep you safe!).

When I woke this morning, strangely enough after only about six hours of sleep, I felt awake and relieved. I also wanted to counteract the grand dame dramas of the night before and start my day well, so it occurred to me to drink my coffee outside on the deck and, like my friend Jerry (who begins each day by praying that “thy will be done”), offer myself to the day. Although I was hesitant because even in the morning, it was near 90 degrees, as soon as I immersed myself into that air, all was fine.

I ended up sitting in an old Adirondacks chair, sipping coffee, amazed at the height of the cottonwood tree in our yard, the rush of the wind, and the blueness of the sky. I sang a little, prayed a little, and enjoyed the peace. Then I realized what I really wanted to do was to read a little more of the book I’ve started — Jill Bolte Taylor’s Stroke of Insight – because I’m so moved by what she’s saying about the convergence of spirit and science. She writes of how the two halves of the brain have completely different personalities: the left side our constructed personality, abilities to think, remember, control and manuver; the right side our ability to connect, be in the moment, rejoice and feel (I am simplifying here for the sake of brevity). She also says, “My stroke of insight would be: Peace is only a thought away, and all we have to do to access it is silence the voice of dominating left mind.“

Sitting in the beauty of one moment — releasing myself from the tasks ahead, worries behind, weather to weather and responsibilities to shoulder — for this one moment shows me how right Taylor is, and also how easy it is for us to cross over to small wonders at any moment.

→ 4 Comments

Tagged ,

I Live In Big Wind Country

Posted on March 24, 2009 | 1 Comment

Kansas is windy, often, and not just a little. When spring comes, the big wind comes with it, and yesterday was a vivid illustration with gusts up to 90 mph in some parts of the state and ordinary old 45 mph gusts regularly around it. It’s hard not to tilt a little when you walk, and when we did balance poses in yoga — in a room in the country, second story, windows all around — it was hard not to fall over (but then it’s often hard not for me to fall over).

Yesterday, semi-trucks overturned on the turnpike, mailboxes left home, our bird feeder flew the coop, and the top of a hard-plastic child playhouse unfurled itself. It was the kind of wind that made me and everyone around me feel a little crazy, off-balance, agitated, confused and overwhelmed.

It reminds me of a good wind story too — and in Kansas, many of the good weather stories (and most of the good stories do involve weather) are obviously wind-related. When Ken, my husband, was but a lad, his family had a mean attack rooster named Chip-Chip, who attacked (using his nasty spurs) everyone but Ken’s grandpa, who had basically trained him to be a the rooster equivalent of Cruella DeVille. One day a tornado, with accompanying big winds, came to the area, and Chip-Chip mysteriously disappeared. Days later, his wasted body was found a few miles away. When humans didn’t, out of decency, exact revenge from Chip-Chip, the wind did.

So now the wind has settled down, and it’s good to be back in the saddle, crossed over to spring with the grasses seeminly scribbled bright green and the trees budding. Yesterday’s big wind is today’s sky all bright baby blue and pristine white clouds, all the debris blasted free from our minds.

→ 1 Comment

Posted in Kansas

Tagged , , ,