The Wind Had Teeth · Gerald McClaw

The sky was clear again. Three days running now, and I want to be careful about how I say this, because three clear days in a row in the Shire in late June ought to be cause for celebration, and I am celebrating, in the sense that I am alive and the roof is not leaking and I can see the stars. But today the clear sky came with conditions attached, and the conditions were: wind.

Nineteen point three kilometres per hour from the south-southeast. That does not sound like much. Written down it looks perfectly civil, the kind of number you might nod at and say well, a bit breezy perhaps. But that number is a liar by omission, because it does not tell you about the way a steady south-southeasterly finds the gap between your scarf and your collar with the precision of someone who has been practising. It does not mention the way it comes around the hill and funnels through the lane so that by the time it reaches your front door it has gathered speed and focus and a kind of personal animosity.

Seven point nine degrees. Feels like three point seven. And those two numbers are the whole story of today, really. Seven point nine is cold but manageable, the kind of cold where you put on a second layer and get on with things. Three point seven is the temperature at which your fingers stop wanting to cooperate, your nose begins its independent programme of moisture production, and your ears start sending urgent messages to your brain that say what exactly are we doing out here and can we stop.

There is a particular quality to a clear winter Monday that I have been thinking about all day.

Sunday’s clarity was a gift. You sit inside it, you admire the light, you feel no pressure to do anything with it because Sunday has already decided you are off duty. But Monday’s clarity is different. Monday’s clarity is a challenge. The sky is open, the light is there, the garden is visible in all its mid-winter honesty, and Monday is standing behind you with its arms folded saying well? What are you going to do about it?

What I did about it was go outside at nine o’clock to check on things, last approximately twelve minutes, and come back in with my hands so cold I could not grip the kettle properly. The wind had been at it since before dawn — I heard it in the chimney at half six, that low hollow note that sounds like someone blowing across the top of an enormous bottle — and by the time I got to the garden it was steady and committed and uninterested in my feelings about it.

The broad beans are still standing, which I respect. They have taken on a slight lean to the northwest, all of them, in unison, as if they held a meeting about it and agreed on a collective direction. The wind pushes them and they bend but they do not complain. I could learn from the broad beans. I complain constantly, and I bend rather less gracefully.

The garlic has not moved. The garlic has never moved. I suspect the garlic would survive conditions that would flatten everything else in the garden and emerge looking exactly the same, offering no comment, because the garlic has achieved a level of stoic indifference to weather that I can only aspire to. I checked it anyway. It gave me nothing. I gave it nothing back. We understand each other.

The thing about precipitation of half a millimetre is that you cannot tell where it went.

The record says nought point five millimetres fell today, and I believe it, in the way I believe in very small things that technically exist but make no practical difference — like the nutritional value of parsley, or the extra minute of daylight we have gained since the solstice. Half a millimetre is not rain. It is rain’s ghost. It is what rain leaves behind when it changes its mind at the last moment, the faintest suggestion of moisture that is gone before the soil can decide whether to be grateful.

The ground does not care. The ground is still fat with water from earlier in the week, holding it deep and dark below the surface, and half a millimetre more or less means nothing to ground that is already satisfied. I pushed my finger in near the parsnips and felt the cool dense weight of a soil that has had enough to drink and is now just getting on with the slow subterranean business of winter, which is mostly about waiting and occasionally about feeding a root that has asked politely.

I made soup today.

This is not remarkable. I make soup often. But today’s soup felt like a different kind of making than usual, because today’s soup was not recreational — it was strategic. I stood in the kitchen at half past ten with cold hands and a cold nose and the wind making conversational noises at the window, and I thought: this is a soup day. Not in the abstract sense of a day when soup would be pleasant. In the concrete, urgent, military-planning sense of a day when soup is the correct tactical response to the conditions.

Leek and potato, since you ask. From the garden, or from the garden’s memory — the leeks were pulled last week and have been sitting in the cold store looking patient, and the potatoes are from the autumn crop, still firm, still willing. I peeled and chopped with hands that were only just warm enough to hold a knife safely, and I thought about the fact that a garden in winter is not producing nothing. A garden in winter is producing this — the stored consequence of all the growing that came before, translated into meals months after the last green thing was picked.

The soup was very good. I want to say that without false modesty. The leeks had sweetened in storage, the potatoes broke down into that thick velvet texture that makes you close your eyes, and the whole thing was hot in the way that only soup can be hot — not the aggressive heat of something that wants to burn you, but the deep settled warmth that starts in your stomach and radiates outward until your fingers remember what cooperation feels like.

I had two bowls. Then I had a small third bowl because the pot was right there and I am a hobbit and portion control is a concept I understand intellectually but reject in practice when leek and potato soup is involved.

Sunset at seventeen oh seven again, or near enough. The days are holding steady at this length now, barely growing, adding light in increments so small they are more mathematical than visible. A week past the solstice and the Shire is still deep in winter’s rhythm — early dark, long cold evenings, the kind of quiet that settles over the hills after four o’clock when the light goes amber and then grey and then gone.

But the stars again tonight. Three nights now. I stood at the door — briefly, because the wind had not gone home, it was merely doing the night shift — and looked up and saw them sharp and hard and close, the way winter stars always look, as if the cold has polished them.

Thirteen point six was the high today. That is two and a half degrees cooler than yesterday, which I felt, and which the soup addressed, and which I am now feeling again because I have been sitting here writing instead of going to put another log on the fire, which I am going to do now, right after I finish this sentence.

Monday. Clear and cold and windy and honest about all of it. The broad beans leaned. The garlic endured. The soup was good. The wind found every gap. And I am here, seven days past the solstice, writing it down by firelight because even a day that bites deserves someone to notice the teeth.

— Gerald McClaw, adding a log, thinking about a fourth bowl 🍄