I live in a part of southern California that gets very windy this time of year. There’s the annual “chase the garbage bins down the street” dance we all do with our neighbors. Super fun.
When I was a kid the wind was sometimes terrifying. It would move furniture around in the backyard and knock branches into my window.
I recall one time I had a friend sleeping over. We kept hearing the wind knocking stuff around outside my bedroom window and freaked ourselves out thinking it was a possible burglar (I’d been the only witness to our house being burgled when I was a young child). I’d probably told my friend that story, and in order to calm ourselves down, we decided to read a book out loud.
It was a book about magical horses, I remember that.
An that the first line in the book that we read was something like, “Listen to the wind as it rustles through the willow trees….”
We both FREAKED the fuck out and couldn’t sleep for the rest of the night.
Last night, as I dozed in my lover’s arms, I heard the wind kicking up outside my bedroom window. I remembered that story and smiled. The wind doesn’t really scare me anymore. Now it makes me feel a sense of nostalgia for a childhood so well lived that those are the “scary” memories I remember.
“The wind used to scare me when I was a kid,” I murmured. “But now, it just makes me feel calm.”
polyammering 