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.
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