“What was that?” Jess asked, oh, around 3am. “Was it the wind?” The wind had plagued Jess’s mind ever since earlier that morning when she read in the news that”violent winds” were on their way. ”Violent winds…oh no…” I’d responded, feigning fear.
“You heard it, too?” I shot back, still in a partial coma. Before Jess confirmed it, I half-thought I had dreamed the thud against our house. To best describe it, it sounded like the UPS man had hurled a package against our front door.
So, I got out of bed to better analyze the situation. The pine trees in the backyard were going nuts. In the midst of the angriest wind I’d ever known, the treetops acted as though, at any minute, they could snap off and blow to China. Was the three little pigs wolf outside? I wondered if any shingles were left on my roof.
In front, banging furiously at our front door step, a strip of siding hung by a string from the exterior of our house, as if a mighty gorilla had been working at it all night. Somehow, it held on all through the night, a miracle in itself.
Not about to tackle a home repair project at three in the morning, I went back to bed feeling uneasy, listening to the wind slap against our bedroom window, feeling like one of the disciples stuck in the middle of the stormy Sea of Galilee, while Jesus snoozed away somewhere below deck. Wake up, Jesus, before our house blows away!
The next morning I groggily drug myself out of bed to go fetch our trashcan that had blown into the street. I was just happy it was still in the vicinity. The wind had died down just a tad, but it still blew mean and with a Siberian sharpness. I moved to the side of the house, stepping over the articles of my neighbor’s trash now in my lawn (hey, I didn’t know they brushed with Colgate!), where I gathered a particulary large cardboard box I knew to be missing from the trashcan.
I went back inside thankful that I had made it through the wind storm of January ‘08. I had learned a hard lesson, indeed: violent winds ain’t no joke.
Categories: Nature
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