What the wind says

In Wisconsin, I walked our dog under a row of pines planted as a windbreak. Instead of stopping the wind, the trees came alive in it, their roar coming from a deeper place.

I looked up at their branches, thick at the top and trimmed, by our neighbor, at the bottom. When not trimming the branches, she often stopped near the trees to pick up leaves and sticks. I took the dog over to say hello.

In a fresh gust, one of the trees lobbed a pine cone at me. Doesn’t it sound nice, I said.

My neighbor, dressed in flannel for the cool fall day, looked around to see what I meant.

The trees, I said, remembering the versions I’d grown up with – Douglas fir, hemlock, and cedar, the wind slipping through them like water, even mimicking the nearby Pacific in their constant sigh.

The sound the wind makes, I said.

She looked from me to the trees. Having lived here all her life, the trees had been a practical constant and something to maintain, something she stopped listening to, just like I stopped hearing a backyard stream and its determined journey down the mountain where I grew up.

Maybe my neighbor considered those pines simply a deterrent to more insistent winds, especially Midwest winter gusts so frozen they coated your eyelashes. The Northwest, too, offered windstorms swaying branches and felling trunks--even last week, a rare summer storm offered winds of 46 mph-- while West Texas fronts heaved tumbleweeds across Highway 84.

My neighbor and I looked up at the branches together. It does make a sound, she said after a moment or two, the wind's sigh filling the space between us.