Easterly Wind

Dry wind blows now out of the west today.  Warm, warm air with only maybe just the tiniest hint of any moisture rustles the leaves of the trees.  Green grass waves but even with an untrained eye you can see the brown underneath.  Recently it has been too dry for the growing things.

 

Dry weather isn’t what caught my attention today.  Looking up I saw the trees bending to the east.  Bent branches on trees leaning east stood out against the blue, blue sky.  

 

Michigan gets its weather from the west.  Snow, rain and tornados almost invariably track east to west.  We don’t really get nor’easters.  

 

In past years driving “up north” I would always notice the windbreaks planted along the edge of older farm fields.  When I was in horticulture class in the 1970s the professor still argued for planting windbreaks to stop erosion and protect the soil.  North of Saint Johns, Michigan there are a couple of fields where the trees in the windbreak are permanently bent from west to east.  A row of trees out in the midst of brown tilled soil tipped fifteen to twenty degrees off perpendicular leaning eastward stands out visually.

 

We think of ourselves as the Midwest here but people just west of us think of Michigan as part of the east.  Maybe the wind and the barrier that Lake Michigan presents make us seem more tied to the east coast that the middle of America.  I don’t know.

 

Today the wind blew a butterfly my way.  A bit of beauty made the day all the more wonderful, east or west, beauty lifts us up.

Words for the Dying

I hide under a dusky orange/red umbrella. Today is a 90F day. The sun beats down. Rays of late afternoon sun filter to the ground in dry gold.  Green, green trees on this very end of Spring day are catching the most direct beams of light. 

My phone sits beside me playing a song called Through the Dark by Helen Jane Long.  Around me and this table at which I sit birds sing in their varied bird voices.  Sat in trees from here all the way down the block each avian is part of today’s choral presentation. A squirrel chitters and a crow calls adding rhythm to the concerto.  The piano tune lifts in deceptively simply notes that seem to pause with hopeful anticipation.  

Inexplicably my computer refuses to put a desktop icon for Word on the desktop. I have asked for the shortcut several times but it has been to no avail.  So each time I begin to compose a piece of prose I have to type in the first few letters of the program’s name in the search box.  The search box brings me up alternatives and today one of them was Words for the Dying. Odd I don’t remember ever putting anything on my computer that contains that phrase. As I looked at the screen a tune called “Embraced Memories” played.  Hmmh, does that mean something?  

Faced with the end when there is no hope and we cannot find the spirit in our heart to exhort that a better life lies ahead, a pure land or a heaven, do we fall back on embraced memories?  Do we talk about that time the waves kept crashing in because the hurricane was far off the coast and we body surfed until we could body surf no more?  Do we talk about that vet assistant student who puked all over everything on our walk home from the bars and her roommate who shed her jeans as easily as peeling off the wrapper of a candy bar? Do we lie and say tomorrow will be better?

What are to be our words for the dying?  Do we mutter Jesus loves you and place a cross in their hand?  

Maybe we talk of grace and of beauty.  Maybe the conversation should be as simple as saying either you have been my friend or I love you. I don’t know the answer to these questions.  I don’t want to answer them from either side of the equation any time soon. This particular music streaming channel seems to be filled with titles that tie into these questions.  Right now the song is called A Thousand Years.  But as you and I know a thousand years is nothing in the realm of the universe and the universal.  Worlds have risen and fallen several times in a thousand years. How many souls have had to be comforted in that span?

Again the hopeful notes slow from a piano and a violin and the piece and this meditation draws to a close.