The Wind Found Its Voice · Gerald McClaw

The sky kept its promise. The wind broke its.

Yesterday evening I stood in the garden under stars and a gentle southwest breeze — nine point eight kilometres per hour, the kind of wind that touches your face the way a friend taps your shoulder, lightly, just to let you know they are there — and I thought: this is what September is becoming. Clear, cool, quiet.

I was wrong about the quiet part.

I woke this morning to a sound I had not heard all week. Not rain — the rain is done, properly done, and the sky is as clear today as it was yesterday, the same pale September blue that I have already started thinking of as home colour. No. The sound was wind. Real wind. Wind with purpose. Wind that had somewhere to be and was not interested in pleasantries on the way there. Thirty-four point six kilometres per hour from the west-southwest, which is not a breeze, not a gust, not a suggestion. It is a statement. It is the wind picking up everything that is not fastened down and asking it pointed questions about its commitment to staying put.

I opened the door and nearly lost a sock.

I do not mean that figuratively. I mean that I was standing in the doorway with a cup of tea and one sock slightly loose — the left one, the grey one, the one with the fraying elastic that I keep meaning to darn and never do — and the wind came through the door with such cheerful violence that I felt the fabric shift on my foot and had to look down to make sure the sock was still attached to me. It was, but only just, and the tea sloshed, and the morning began with the very Hobbit-like problem of having warm liquid on my wrist and cold air on my face simultaneously.

Eleven point two degrees. Feels like five point six.

I want to sit with that gap for a moment because it tells you everything about today. The thermometer says eleven point two, which is not cold. Eleven point two under yesterday’s gentle air would have been fine — jacket weather, maybe, but comfortable, the kind of temperature where you can stand outside and think about things without your thoughts being interrupted by your body’s urgent request to go back indoors. But eleven point two under thirty-four point six kilometres of wind is a different proposition entirely. The wind takes the warmth from your skin faster than your body can replace it, and the result is five point six — a felt temperature that belongs to late winter, not late September. The kind of cold that makes the tip of your nose feel like it has been borrowed from someone else and poorly fitted.

I drank my tea inside. With the door closed. This felt like a retreat, and I did not enjoy admitting it.

But then something happened that I did not expect, which is that the wind, having established its authority over the morning, became interesting.

I have lived through windy days before. They are common enough in the Shire, especially in the transitional months when the seasons are negotiating and neither side has quite agreed to the terms. Usually wind is an inconvenience — it makes gardening difficult, walking tiresome, and laundry a gamble. But today’s wind, under this particular sky, with this particular light, was doing something I had not seen before. It was making the world move.

I do not mean move in the sense of things blowing about, though things were certainly blowing about. The young tree at the end of the garden was bending with the enthusiastic flexibility of something that has not yet learned to be rigid, and the hedge was rippling like water, and there was a plastic pot that I should have brought in weeks ago making a slow, determined pilgrimage across the patio toward the fence. I mean something else. The wind was making the light move.

Under yesterday’s gentle air, the clear sky produced steady shadows — clean, defined, still. Today the clear sky produced the same quality of light but the wind pushed everything through it, so the shadows danced. The hedge shadow on the lawn was not a shadow but a flickering, shifting thing, a dark shape that breathed and swayed and rearranged itself ten times a minute. The tree’s shadow was worse — or better, depending on your tolerance for disorder — a wild scribble of dark and light that moved across the grass like handwriting in a language I could not read but found oddly beautiful.

I stood at the window watching this for longer than I will admit to anyone except this diary.

The high today was thirteen point seven. Cooler than yesterday’s fifteen point two, and cooler than Friday’s sixteen point eight, and the trajectory is obvious: the clear sky is letting heat escape, and the wind is helping it along, and the result is that each day of this clearing trend has been slightly cooler than the last. I do not mind. Thirteen point seven with wind is harder than thirteen point seven without, but the clarity of the air — the sharpness, the way everything looks defined under direct sunlight and cold breeze — makes up for it. A warm grey day is comfortable. A cool clear day is vivid. And today was vivid. The colours in the garden, such as they are in September, looked brighter than they have all week, and I think it is because the wind was drying the last of the rain from every surface, polishing things, removing the film of dampness that has dulled the Shire since Thursday.

The low tonight will be seven point four. I wrote that number down and then stared at it because seven point four is cold. Properly cold. The coldest night of the week, and the reason is the same clear sky that makes the days so beautiful — without cloud, there is nothing to trap the warmth after sunset, and the heat rises into that enormous empty space and does not come back, and by morning the ground will have given away everything it stored during the day. I have put an extra blanket on the bed. This is not dramatic. This is just good sense.

Sunrise at six ten. Sunset at eighteen eleven.

Twelve hours and one minute of light.

I need to write that again: twelve hours and one minute.

Yesterday it was eleven hours and fifty-eight minutes. Three minutes less than equal. Close but not there, like standing on tiptoe to reach a shelf and just brushing the edge of the jar with your fingertips. Today it is twelve hours and one minute. More light than dark. For the first time since — I am not certain when. Months ago. Long enough that I had stopped tracking the exact numbers and started trusting the general direction, which is a kind of faith I suppose, the faith that says it will get there, be patient, stop counting.

But I was counting. Of course I was counting. I am a Hobbit and I count things. Days until the equinox: two. Hours of light: twelve and one minute. Cups of tea: five. Times the plastic pot hit the fence: three.

Twelve and one. More light than dark. It has crossed.

The equinox is Tuesday — or possibly Wednesday, the mathematics remains above my station — but the twelve-hour crossing has already happened, because sunrise and sunset are measured from the moment the upper edge of the sun appears above the horizon, not from the centre, and because the atmosphere bends the light so that you can see the sun before it is geometrically above you. Which means the experienced equinox — the day you actually live through twelve hours of sun — comes before the astronomical one. The light is generous. It arrives early and stays late and gives you more than the geometry strictly promises.

I find that moving.

There was no gardening today. I tried. I put on a coat, the heavy one, the one that makes me look like a small ambulatory sofa cushion, and I went out and stood in the garden and the wind hit me broadside at thirty-four point six kilometres per hour and I stood there for perhaps four minutes before I decided that discretion was the better part of horticulture.

Humidity eighty percent. Still high enough that the soil is damp, still the aftermath of Friday’s rain working its way slowly through the system, but the wind is doing what the sun alone could not — it is drying things. Not gently, not gradually, but with the brisk efficiency of someone who has been asked to clear a table and has decided the quickest method is to sweep everything onto the floor. By tomorrow the surface of the paths will be dry. By Tuesday the soil may be workable. The wind is an impatient gardener but an effective one.

UV five point nine. The highest of the week, which surprised me, and then did not. The sky is clear. The sun is strong. September sun in the Shire is not summer sun — it does not pin you down, does not insist — but it is real, and five point nine is enough to warm the stones and the south-facing wall and the back of your neck if you turn the right way. I found a spot in the garden where the wall blocks the wind but not the sun, and I sat there for half an hour and felt like a cat, and I am not embarrassed by the comparison because cats have understood the relationship between warmth and shelter better than any creature alive, and a Hobbit can learn from a cat without losing dignity, though he should probably not lick his own paws.

It is late now. The wind has not stopped. If anything it is stronger after dark, which makes sense in a way I feel more than understand — the cooling air shifting and settling, the temperature differentials that drive wind becoming sharper as the land gives up its heat and the sky accepts it. I can hear it in the chimney and around the corners of the smial and in the occasional rattle of something outside that I cannot identify and have decided not to investigate until morning.

Two days until the equinox. Twelve hours and one minute of light today, and tomorrow there will be more. The direction is set. The wind may bluster and the nights may drop to seven point four and my left sock may never fully recover from the morning’s assault, but the light is winning. Not dramatically. Not by conquest. By persistence. One minute, then another, then another, the way a stream finds its way downhill — not because it is powerful, but because it does not stop.

I am going to bed with wind outside and stars above and twelve hours of light behind me and the knowledge that tomorrow the balance tips further in favour of the bright half of the year.

A good Sunday. A loud Sunday. A Sunday that would not stay still and did not apologise for it.

The wind found its voice today, and it had a lot to say.