Windswept.

Hard winds blew on Monday. The fields took off. That's how we say it. The wind grinds our lives and hilltops down with our own dirt.  

My jaw set hard in irritation, teeth clenched, kept the wind out of my mouth. But I would open it to complain and, inevitably, the wind would fill it with crunchy grit.

A Phoebe's nest, a soft and precise bowl made of prairie condensed, tried to stop the wind. I found it on the ground, unmoored from its high perch, grasses woven with feathers and fur, still cradling one egg.  

Wind, dirt-drunk, and made visible in a brown smoke dance, buries fences and roads with drifts. The horizon a blurred chalky fog. Where the wind herded tumbleweeds across the road, the gravel was left scarred and gouged like it had been in a knife fight. 

The neighbor's hay barn tried to hold the wind. It offered the wind a place as cool and quiet as evening. So much wind swelled in it that the walls fell out. He watched as the roof flapped like a shirt drying on the line before flying away, exploding itself around fence posts. As we spoke with him, the walls and roof lay scattered about, insides exposed, like a cleaned carcass.

Our house sheltered us, but the wind bore down so hard our house whistled and hummed and groaned. The wind squeezed through the cracks and piled dirt on the windowledges like an hourglass slowly filling with time.

 

Comments

[Lex]

very timely post. i just saw on American Experience a show on the dust bowl in the 30's. i was amazed to see footage of the dust clouds, huge black thick. inches of dust on everything after they blew through, the health problems of humans and animals. man made but still such a travesty.