Weather Comes Round
I’m on my porch in Cincy, and today the wind is firing down from the north, cold, the first signs of autumn here after a week of rain. The rain has left half the sunflower heads in my garden black with mold and white webs. I cut them from the stalks, turned them up on the deck to dry in the sun. One head is full of striped teeth, sun flares tucked into its core that will not rot. These will be planted next spring.
It is late September, but part of me thinks the north wind is actually calling from my father’s farm in Georgia, that same wind I walked through and wrote of this summer that connected thunderstorm to thunderstorm, brought rain and lightning over my brother’s fields. As I wrote in an earlier blog, the wind through the pine needles in South Georgia is the beginning place of the wind itself.
It has now slipped over the world, covered it whole, and found me on this porch waiting for its return. I know if I walk from these steps, allow the wind to lead me far enough away, it will carry me to next summer and I will again be in my brother’s fields.