When I perched in the gable of the old apple tree and clung to the peeling bark, or when I feebly pumped my feet on the homemade swing – the seat slippery, mint-green linoleum – or when I walked across the potato fields near our house with my arms outstretched while other people flew kites – that’s when I felt its presence, its beingness.
I knew my people would consider me odd for talking to the wind, so I kept these experiences to myself. And, here’s the thing – the wind talked back. I don’t recall if they were actual words in my mother tongue, but I remember telling it to shift direction over the field toward the city’s orchard, and it would comply. It would hold me by my armpits on the swing so I could safely soar high, and higher. On lone walks, I begged it to let me levitate, and up went my toes, skimming the ground. I would ask for it to take me places, and from my seat in the apple tree, I traveled – oh, did I travel. It was a lightness I found, a vital secrecy and relationship, but then, life went on and grow-upping happened, and then I just forgot.
A continent and an ocean, a couple colleges, a wedding, a move, a house, two kids, five to seven dogs, a swing for our kids, and eleven apple trees in my own yard later, followed by over four years of unspeakable hardness. Then, the hardest decision of my life, a love and a loss so profound that I am now more wound than scab, more witch than woman. The yin-yang tilt-a-whirl of treatment and hospital, home and hospice punctuated by moments so exquisite and tender, I will eventually make poetry of them. But when I left hospice with my children and a friend that last night, with the equinox knocking itself into this material world through the harshest storm we’d felt in months, with even the ancient pines bowing to its more ancient powers and the car rattling like a rusty engine on tracks, I sensed an otherness amidst this void, this loss, this sadness.
The next day, and the day after, and the day after, I took all of myself to the sea. On the walk from my house, I dodged neighbors who asked how we were doing and dogs that wagged and begged for pets, and even the puddles the kids and I used to jump. I took all of myself to the pier, to our pier, and with the storm unrelenting, I yelled and screamed (for you). That’s when my friend, my relative, my anchor, the wind, came roaring and whispering back –
and has been lifting me since.
