Thursday, June 7, 2007

One Fine Windy Day

Hot, dry high winds all afternoon. So odd. The light green maple leaf underbellies showed all day long, a sign my grandmother always told me meant rain was soon to come. Multiple branches litter the yards, and clusters of live green leaves are strewn in the neighborhood streets. This is an unusual wind--unusually strong, unusually long-lasting. Something is blowing in. Yes, there are tornados in the upper midwest today, but here there is not a cloud in the sky. This wind is hot and mysterious, as if something entirely different is being conjured. And this evening, even though the humidity is low, the sky appears dusky as if the air is full of moisture.

In the normally humid summer of this area, today's mere 42% humidity is an oddity. I drank a half gallon of iced tea. In an attempt to take advantage of the drier air, I tried to hang laundry on a wooden rack in the back yard, but no matter how I oriented it to the wind, the entire rack of clothes would end up collapsed. The wind has been strong enough today that I saw very few birds or squirrels in the yard; normally I watch 6-9 squirrels and countless birds. They are hunkering down. I'm sure it's just too much effort for the birds to fly, and who knows what the squirrels are thinking?

3 comments:

Candy Rant said...

Great book title:

Who Knows What the Squirrels Are Thinking?

Domhan said...

I love it!

A couple of years ago, I overheard part of a great conversation a group of my students were having. The snippet I heard was "...the last one to be eaten." I told them I didn't know what the hell they were talking about, but could I use that as the title of a book one day?

They told me they decided that if they were on a deserted island with no food and had to resort to canibalism, that Kristi, the shortest and leanest of them, would be "the last one to be eaten."

The logic of that totally cracks me up everytime I think of it. It reminds me of Donald Hall's String to Short to be Saved (which was written on a shoebox he found full of short pieces of string).

Domhan said...

Oops. I spelled "to" wrong. The book is String TOO Short to be Saved. I'd totally bop my students for that!