All

    The wind blew all morning. She heard it in the trees, heard it unfold the shingles on the roof of the house, dropping them—flap, flap, flap. She heard it against the screen, saw the lines of snow splattered on the window, heard it sweep across the yard, saw it leave a vertical stripe of snow on the trunk of every tree trunk. It was an overwhelming, invisible presence--nothing was spared.

    She stood at the window with her back to the fire and watched the wind, smiled and watched. She was seeing something, watching something invisible, something that nobody could see, but was there, oh yes, it was there. 

    O wind, a-blowing all day long, she sang. "O wind, that sings so loud a song!"

    This wind held the trees, moved the whole trunk, not just the crown, and picked up snow from the frozen lake so by the time the wind reached her at the window, it was a screeching wall of white, a yowling wind, reveling in its very breath, the visible breath of its existence.

    “I felt you push, I heard you call,/I could not see yourself at all..."

    He didn't move, never glanced up from the crossword, never noticed that cosmic forces were shrieking for his attention.

    “It's a message from Jupiter,” she said, “or Uranus, one of the distant, frozen planets where ice and wind are everything. Look at it--it's the all!”

    “Awl?” he said, without looking up. “AWL--a pointed tool....just what I needed!”

    The wind tore off a branch of the ash tree and slammed it against the window. She couldn’t have said it better herself.

© 2024 Kathleen Coskran (citation from The Wind by Robert Louis Stevenson)