The wind woke me up again last month. The trees hissed like a chorus, the vines scraped the windows, and the gutters moaned low. A wildness that was obviously larger than my home pressed hard against its corners and threatened to move it. Suddenly, I was vitally awake, and trying frantically to remember whether there was anything I have left undone, or anything outside that needed my protection.
I remember the laundry, which was still hanging on line. From the window, I could see that it had turned feral, and I wasn't sure whether I should be trying to protect it or to protect my family from it. All the clothes were reaching toward the house, pulling the bowed clothesline behind them. Ian's white button-down shirts, fastened at the shirt tails, had filled with narrow bodies of wind, complete with shoulders and slender torsos. They shook their arms at us feverishly over and over again.
As I stood frozen at the window, looking out at the laundry, a more mysterious sound pressed itself into my awareness. In a rhythm independent from the hissing of the trees came a swelling noise so low, that it bordered on vibration. If I moved, I could not hear it, but if I stood still it rumbled and quieted on the very edge of my awareness like an ache. The earth itself must've been moving. I could think of no other explanation. From the window, the dark fields looked still, but I could barely make out the black rectangle of turned earth in our little clover field, where our neighbor had plowed up next year's garden patch. It looked like it was brooding, and like it might be capable of movement, but that little patch of earth was too small to make such a noise.
I went back to bed and lay in the dark, ready to jump up at any moment and protect something. I have done this many times now. It never makes a difference that I can think of nothing to protect, and that even if I did, my protection would be ineffectual. I just lie here, ready. If Ian is with me, I let his warmth and slow breathing lure me into sleep, but if I am alone, as I often am, I just stay awake.
In a way, this is exactly what I've always wanted, I told myself unconvincingly. For a decade before I moved to the country, the sound of wind in the trees filled me with such longing that I sometimes broke down and cried. I wanted so desperately to be closer to the life that rose up from the earth and swirled around me. I wanted to know it, and I wanted it to know me. I wanted to live with it like family. Having a family with small children has kept me awake for hours in the night, but at least my children are warm. I can put my arms around them and hold them until I glow with delight and peace. I know they love me. I don't think the wind loves me. I don't think it even sees me.
As I had done many times before, I reminded myself that my house has been standing through 110 years of windy nights without any help from me, and that it did not need any help from me now either. For some reason, the logic sank in this time. Like a child who turns inexplicably rational in the middle of a tearful argument, I embraced my reasonable explanation as if it had always been obvious to me. I snuggled deeper into the quilt, and as I drifted off, I had a premonition. Some night years from now, I will hear the wind trees, vines will screech, and the gutters will moan, and I will wake up, wondering whether there is anything I should attend to outside. Remembering nothing that needs to be done, I will snuggle back under the covers, and let the wind tell me over and over again, "You are home. You are home."
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