Bluster

     I awoke in the wee hours of the morning to the sound of the wind shouting to get in. I usually feel quite friendly toward this visitor and his brethren, even the overblown ones, but this time he was pounding on the door like a drunken sailor. My normally placid windchime was ringing a frantic warning. When I peeked out the bedroom window, I saw that my lovely wintercreeper, clinging tenaciously to the corner of the garage beside my front walk for over twenty years, had been cruelly ravaged and thrown to the ground.

     Such piratical behavior is not welcome here. So I kept my door firmly shut against the loudmouthed marauder, but as the windows continued to rattle and wave after wave of tide-wind slammed against the house in fits of rage, I must confess to a little trembling beneath all of my bravado.

A furore septemtriones libera nos, Domine

From the fury of the northwind, Oh Lord deliver us!

     I was alone in the house. It was dark, still several hours until dawn. And I most certainly could not go back to sleep. So I sat in a cosy room furthest from the sound of the wind cracking its blustering cheeks and crocheted a winter scarf striped with echoes of the Aurora Borealis.

Wild wind, sail me away

Over the greensward sea,

My bark and I shall leap the sky

And toss upon the lea.

Mad wind, bear me away

Across the grassy tide,

Break thy steed o'er the coursing mead

Mount where the corbie rides!

                                                                         ~ Nib of Nib's End ~

    

My Veterans

Homage to a Grandfather

     It has been nearly three years since my father passed away. He was a very young man when he joined the Navy and went off to fight in the Pacific in WWII.  He was understandably proud of his three grandsons (two of them pictured above) who joined the Marines and fought in Iraq.

     I went to put flowers on my parents grave last month when I went home to visit with family. They are buried together in a veterans cemetery, and there are many more headstones surrounding their plot than the last time I visited. It took my sisters and I a little longer to find it. As I read the inscriptions of their neighbors, it struck me how many wars and different branches of service are represented in that one section of the cemetery.

     To my shame, Veterans Day has, more often than not, been just another day on the calendar for me. Not any more. Since that day that I experienced the deeply moving level of respect and honor veteran strangers demonstrated toward my father at his burial, it has changed my perspective and my response.

     It is personal now.

The Sound of Fog

     "It's fun walking in a cloud," said our live-in daughter.  "I like the sound of it."

     We woke up to fog this morning. We seldom get it where we live, so it feels like an anomaly. I remember the moaning of the foghorns out on the Puget Sound where I grew up. To me, that is the sound of fog. But the only body of water large enough to need them where we now live is nearly an hour away.

     "What does the fog sound like?" I asked my daughter.

     "It sounds like rain...only it isn't."

     She is right.  Here, in this long pause between the cornfields and the Lake, the trees were dripping with cloud this morning.

     What does fog sound like to you?