just a thought

There’s very little occurring in Ada tonight but the weather. I’ve heard my neighbors talk about the winter wind around here, how during November the northern currents move absolutely unimpeded through the area, but I’d not noticed it until tonight. The wind has descended. As I sit upstairs in my little cubbyhole, trying to study, sipping tea and listening to a bit of Gillian Welch, the wind has wrapped around my house. It is a constant murmur, building and slowing and building again, enough to make the neighborhood dogs bark. When a particularly large gust arrives, after its untold movements across a full day over the western flatlands, the house records its presence, creaking here and there around the windows, something on the front porch whistling. This afternoon a storm passed over borne on this same progression of air and was gone within minutes, thunderheads piled up to the sky, prairie schooners moving east. Leaving the town wet and washed. I walked outside and watched bright orange gold from the setting sun spread outward from behind clouds larger than the Midwest itself. Rain clung to the air. Now it is dark, the moon’s light barely a pale wash on the rim of the horizon, and a damp wind coils and races through the streets, eddying against houses and released again over the fields east of town. It grows colder each hour. The squall that moved over us this afternoon is probably somewhere in western Pennsylvania now, wetting down the forests and cornfields around Pittsburg and worrying the dogs there. By tomorrow morning the wind will be tossing waves out over the Atlantic. But now I get to enjoy it, listening to its soft cycles against my house, walking outside and watching it swish the trees around like brooms. As I stand in the street and watch the neighborhood lean and sway I suddenly feel like I am at the bottom of a great river, feeling the water flow past me, bouncing off houses and bending the dogwoods downstream. This river might be huge, spreading its shores from Maine to Georgia, smoothing its channel here. I am caught in its current.