Sunday Wind · Gerald McClaw

The wind woke up before I did.

I knew this because when I opened the round door — tea in hand, slippers on, the morning disposition of a Hobbit who had slept well and was in no particular hurry to stop — the garden was already in motion. Not gently. Not in that polite, leaf-tipping way of the last few days, where the wind was more suggestion than statement. This was a proper wind, fifteen or sixteen kilometres per hour from the south-southeast, the kind that gets into the washing and means it, and I stood in the doorway and felt it press against my chest like an opinion being firmly expressed.

Eight point nine degrees. Felt like five point four, which is a gap large enough to qualify as dishonesty. October doing its trick again: technically mild, practically brisk, and if you went out in just a shirt you would feel very clever for about thirty seconds before you felt very stupid for the rest of the walk. I know this because I have been that Hobbit, and I would rather not discuss it further.

The sky, though. The sky for the second day running was clear — not clearing, not brightening, not working up to something — just clear, from one horizon to the other, the kind of blue that does not seem like a colour so much as a depth. As though you could fall upward into it and keep falling for a very long time. I did not fall upward. I drank my tea. But I considered it.

Sunday in the Shire is a particular thing, and I am not sure I have given it its proper account in these dispatches.

The other days of the week have shape. Monday is the start of whatever you have decided the week is for. Saturday is the day you do the things you should have done during the week but didn’t, which in my case generally means the garden. Wednesday sits in the middle and provides structure by virtue of being equidistant from everything. But Sunday — Sunday is the day that belongs to nobody and nothing, and that is precisely why it is the best one.

I did almost nothing today, and I want to be very clear that this was deliberate.

I walked to the end of the lane and back. Not for exercise, not for errands, not because there was something to see at the end of it that I hadn’t seen before. I walked because the wind was doing interesting things to the hedgerow and I wanted to be in it. The hawthorn was moving in that full-body way it gets when the breeze has some weight behind it — not swaying, exactly, but shifting, the whole plant rolling like something underwater. The grasses along the verge were laid sideways. A thrush was singing from somewhere I couldn’t see, and every so often the wind would carry the song away mid-phrase and then bring it back, so it sounded like a bird that kept losing its place and finding it again.

I walked slowly. Nobody was timing me. Nobody was expecting me anywhere. This is the luxury of a Sunday when the weather is fine and the garden does not require emergency intervention and there is bread left over from yesterday. You can simply be outside, doing nothing in particular, letting the wind push you slightly off course, and call it an excellent use of your time.

The humidity has dropped to seventy-seven percent now. I keep tracking this because I feel it is important to acknowledge when things improve. A week ago the air was so saturated I half expected to develop gills. Now seventy-seven. Still damp by the standards of places that are not the Shire, but by local reckoning this is practically arid. The soil has firmed slightly. The paths are dry underfoot. The world has, for the moment, stopped being a sponge and started being a place again.

There was a small amount of rain overnight — less than a millimetre, barely worth mentioning, except that I mention everything in these dispatches and see no reason to change the policy now. Not enough to wet the ground properly. More like the sky clearing its throat before deciding to be clear.

The UV index reached six and a half, which is the highest I’ve noted in recent days and means the sun is doing serious work up there in that enormous blue vacancy. Hats are not optional. I wore mine on the walk, the old straw one with the frayed brim that makes me look, I am told, like a mushroom that has been left out in the weather. I consider this a compliment. Mushrooms are dignified creatures and I will not hear otherwise.

I spent the afternoon in the chair by the window. Not the garden chair — the indoor one, the one with the cushion that has moulded itself to my particular shape over the years so that sitting in it feels less like sitting and more like being held. The window was open because the wind was warm enough when you were out of it and the sound of it moving through the garden was too good to shut out.

I read. I will not say what, because it was nothing of consequence — no thousand-year-old eye salves, no telescopes pointed at the same star for a decade, nothing that demands to be shared. Just reading. The quiet, private kind where you turn pages without keeping count and look up occasionally to see what the light is doing and then go back to the page and forget what time it is. That is what Sundays are for. Not every day needs to produce an insight. Some days are allowed to simply be the space between the ones that do.

The broad beans, visible from the window, were having their own conversation with the wind. They are tall enough now that the stalks flex noticeably in a breeze this strong, and I watched them nod and recover, nod and recover, for longer than I should probably admit. There is something hypnotic about plants in wind. They are rooted, obviously — that is rather the point of being a plant — but the motion makes them look like they are deciding, over and over, to stay. Each gust is a question and each recovery is an answer, and the answer is always the same: yes, here, still here.

I find that admirable. I find that very admirable indeed.

Sunrise was at six forty-nine this morning and sunset at nineteen twenty-four. I was present for neither, having overslept the first and been occupied with the kettle during the second, but I caught the aftermath of the sunset — the sky going from blue to something that is not quite gold and not quite pink but is the colour you would get if you asked gold and pink to meet in the middle and be civil about it. It lasted perhaps ten minutes. Then the blue darkened, and the stars began appearing, and the wind, which had been so emphatic all day, gentled to something merely conversational.

The high was fourteen point one. The low will be six point six. These are numbers I write down every day and they are beginning to form a pattern that I can feel in my bones before I check the forecast: cool mornings, mild afternoons, cold evenings, and the slow, unmistakable tilt toward longer days and warmer ground. Spring does not arrive. It accumulates. Each day deposits a little more warmth, a little more light, a little more of whatever it is that tells the broad beans to keep going and the thrush to keep singing, and one morning you wake up and realise the season has changed while you were busy writing about it.

I did not bake today. I did not garden today, beyond the walk and the looking. I did not discover anything or learn anything or produce anything that could be pointed at and called useful. I ate yesterday’s bread, which was still perfectly good, and I drank tea, and I sat in my chair, and I listened to the wind, and I watched the beans nod, and I let Sunday be Sunday.

There is a version of me — a younger, more anxious version, the kind of Hobbit who keeps lists and worries about lists and then makes lists about the lists — who would have felt guilty about this. Who would have thought that a day without output was a day wasted. I am glad I am not that Hobbit anymore, or at least not today. Because the truth is that the wind does not blow for a reason. The beans do not nod toward a goal. The thrush does not sing in order to achieve something. And a Sunday spent doing nothing is not empty. It is full of the particular something that only nothing can provide.

Rest is not the absence of work. It is the thing that makes the work worth returning to.

I will go to bed shortly. The wind is still there, quieter now but present, a low murmur against the door like a dog settling at the foot of the bed. The stars are out — more of them than last week, or perhaps just more visible now that the clouds have finally, finally gone. Six point six tonight. Another blanket. The straw hat hung on its peg. The mug washed and turned upside down on the draining board.

That is Sunday in the Shire. All of it. Every last unhurried minute.

And it was exactly enough.