Wind! Trees!

We are having a Proper Windstorm. My part of town is a forest, and great gusts of wind are littering the ground with branches, leaves, and needles. Swirls of fog descend into the neighborhood and wreathe the wooded hills, and the very lightest rains dust us with moisture. When I drove past the ponderosa pines dancing above the wellness center, I couldn't help but think of John Muir lashing himself high in a douglas-fir, the better to experience the swaying of a long night's storm.

Is this perverse affinity for weather that some surely find dreadful a mark of our shared cultural heritage, or is it genetic, this excitement at the wildness of air? Not a coincidence, surely, that today I find myself wanting to apply myself again to Gaelic (though where would I find the time?).

This is probably the last windstorm for our ailing 100' cottonwood, though. Two more weeks until it comes down.

"Like a delicate air raisin."

That's how Patrick described the world's oldest living bubble, on Atlantis Squarepantis.