Today’s Weather

10/30/20

The wind is howling as I wake today, and leaves fly through the air. Without my glasses, the leaves resemble birds, but then I see a dozen crows, twice their size, gathering in an evergreen tree. One sits, facing the wind, on the center uppermost branch while the others hover in and out in search of the perfect perch for this moment of braving the gusts. A murder of crows. Tomorrow is Halloween with a Hunter’s Moon, the Waxing Gibbous phase brightly illuminated by the sun. Ray’s Weather tells me that the wind is moving in gusts up to 40mph. Zeta has passed through with a chilly high-pressure system on its heels. The crows seem quite content with the challenge. I have been raking leaves for several weeks now. The maples and hickory trees released first. Piles of red and yellow. Yesterday I raked brown oak leaves, and they seem to be the ones still flying through the air. Oddly, it is the lilacs’ green leaves that are holding stubbornly to their limbs. Maybe they feel protected near the house and garden wall. On my cell phone, Ray is telling me about La Niña and El Niño, about the weather pattern “wildcards” called the “North Atlantic and Arctic Oscillations,” about the Icelandic lows and Azores highs. My imagination is soaring between Spanish words rolling off my tongue to the lovely sounds of words that move like “oscillation” to geography, world travel, and back to home. When we first saw our land, the weather was sunny and calm. We were warned of the wind but hadn’t experienced it. The house we build has proved steady and strong. The winds roared our first year and the house stood still. Just as today.