The wind howls through the empty treetops again. Howling as if it means to sweep the stubbled fields clear, as if it can’t bear to leave things as or where they are, as if it’s in a rush to get out of here. It keens across the sharp edge of the corrugated steel roof down the street and moans past the corner of our house. Inside, it drives a fine grit around the kitchen window and onto the sill. Then, it sighs as if to catch its breath, hesitates, and suddenly pushes against the siding, bangs the upside-down coffee can covering the vent pipe near the backdoor, flails limbs across the gray sky, and tumbles a riot of dry brown leaves curled into fists down the empty street — its wail written against the house. Again.
The season has turned and calls with a dog-eared voice. Last week a hard blow out of the northwest tore a forty-foot maple that stood along the county road in half, the trunk split, the south side crashing across the driveway and flattening the mailbox against the curb. It’s just as well. Whatever news meant to arrive was likely bad, anyway. Not that one crushed mailbox changes anything, but it seems symptomatic of the times. People don’t want to know; they just believe in what suits them. Believe in rumors, in lies, in conspiracy theories. In hoaxes, falsehoods, distortions. In faith over science, in talking heads over experts, in the prognostications of fortune cookies and tea leaves over the blunt facts staring them in the face. And so it blows, and blows — a warning written against the house.
When dark falls, the wind usually pulls back, slows its breath till well after dawn, but not tonight. Tonight, it drives the clouds into the arms of trees, shears them in the blades of wind turbines, grinds them into fields where they might rise in a gray ground fog tomorrow or the next day. It sweeps the cold sky clear so those far-flung stars’ antique light, light outliving its source, flickers, long after the fact, through the reeling limbs of the neighbor’s maple. After the reaction that turned the glow loose, that burned itself out, that caused it to collapse into the dark, the light bores on through the ages until bits of it finally arrive here. If we pay attention, we’ll find a glimmer slipping through the limbs, a bit of light that might cause us to see the truth beyond our own nose and with a clarity and steadfastness not afforded by blind belief or ignorance or excuses. Maybe. Just maybe it casts a trace of truth against the written house.
And this morning it seems the wind has shifted. Down the street, above the old high school football field, absent its goalposts and yard lines and unused since consolidation sent games to another town, a red-tailed hawk rides the current like a kite. He hovers above the grass in front of the ten rows of wooden bleachers, bowed and cracked, on one sideline and the lines of ash trees and brush and corn stubble just beyond the other. Alone, he drifts up, facing the wind, and dips left, sunlight glinting off his back, the burnt-red tail a brief flare against the blue sky.
Then, as he sinks into a hollow in the air, he slips right, banking on a new current to catch him and lift him above the top row of bleachers where he hangs motionless in the sun, as if gravity were a fiction, as if yesterdays’ burdens were lifted though not forgotten, as if what was written might not be repeated.
