WINDSTORM

The fierce wind this week in Kingston brought down far more fences than it did trees. I sleep high in the house, right under the rafters, and was intermittently alarmed. While I sought more sleep, huddled under cold sheets, the force of that wind arrived in my mind’s eye as a series of pale grey shadows crowding me into a corner of the bed. It was a jostling rather than a face. The framing in the dormer creaked, and water smashed against the old windows. And yet morning proved that the real damage had occurred down near the ground.  

It must have rushed mid-night through our gardens like some cartoon beast, I thought. A Seussian sort of buffalo snorting gleefully through pressure-treated timber. And I like that idea very much - of a wind furiously hugging the ground, its nose pushed down hard like some Italian race car. Or like a mad blind bull released into a sadistic maze of rodeos.

All these ways of imagining the invisible. A wind with a curfew marked by altitude rather than time. A height limit, then, lest it should fall and hurt itself. Its mandate to hassle the lilac before it worries the chimneys.

And just to finish the fleeting thought, I also saw very faintly, in trying to summon more exactly the wind’s shape, a nightclub bouncer huffing into a belligerent wooden crowd. And beyond that disturbance, a green sea rising up in a lather to inundate the green pilings of an ancient pier.