Wind (10/31)

  10 of 31 - SOLSC 2021

As the wind whips the the sides of our home and causes the palm trees to dance, violently, I pause. When has wind been one of the most dominant aspects of an experience?

I have had the opportunity to round Cape Horn several times. Sometimes it has been as flat as a lake on a calm day, and then there was this one time. 40+ foot seas, everything is battened down, and I vacillated between wanting to stay where I could see the crash of foam as we slammed through wave after wave and wanting to curl up in my bed until it was over.

That one night in the tent where the wind whipped sand against us with such force that it collapsed the tent. I spent hours and hours sitting up, with the walls of the tent slapping against me, in an attempt to keep the sides high enough that my daughter would continue to sleep - unaware and unafraid.

The turbulence returning to Beirut one night in the middle of a storm and expecting to land in Cyprus yet the jumping plane surprisingly was both allowed and able to put down in Lebanon. We slept in our own beds thinking of all those who had fled Syria who weren't warm and dry.

Johnny sharing his love of kite flying one sunny afternoon in Skagway with his arms wrapped around my waist so I didn't sail off at the end of the string. 

Trying to sleep in Yoder, WY with the bedroom at the windward end of the house; flat as far as you could see so that exhaustion was one thing to break the buffer between my sleep and the wind.

Singing "It's The End Of The World As We Know It" as we walked up the middle of the sepia toned road, back to our dorm, when class was abruptly cancelled to get everyone to safety as the huge pines and threatening fires pushed down on my college campus.