God is in the Wind

A Story of Nostalgia

The wind hasn’t changed.

When I was young, I could feel God in the wind. The way you could feel it caress your neck, lift your hair off your forehead, that particular smell it has no matter where you are or what time of year. That wind has carried me through almost thirty years; and while everything else has changed, the wind is still exactly the same.

I wrote a snippet about that wind in one of my unpublished stories, one of my earliest memories of God:

I start across the grass, feeling my toes sink into the springy green carpet, watching out for any unsuspecting honey bees that might be ready to sting a careless foot. A breeze stirs my hair, and I lift my face to the wind, closing my eyes against the warm sun. It feels so good, I laugh out loud in sheer delight. And then, in the near silence that rings in the space after my laugh and before my next breath, I hear it.

It’s a whisper, so gentle and faint that I can almost believe I imagined it. A different sort of person might, but not me. It’s a sigh, carried along on the wind, bringing the whisper of my name with it to tickle my ears, pronounced in a way that makes me like it for the first time…

Misty…

I pause and gaze across the field. The grass is just a little bit greener than it was before, the sky a little bluer. A stillness settles in my chest.

This must be God, then.

It was the one and only time in my life that I have heard my name in the wind (which, of course, wasn’t actually Misty but my real name).

Now, the wind brings thirty years of memories with it. This one, sometimes, but other memories, too.

Sometimes it makes me think of Atlas and the early days of our relationship when love was such an easy thing to accomplish. I can hear the music -

Mary, there is no hope for us, if this GM van don’t make it across the state line, we might as well lay down and die; because if Florida takes us, we’re taking everyone down with us; where we’re coming from, yea! will be the death of us! (We Laugh at Danger and Break All the Rules, by Against Me!)

I can taste the Ginger Ale and Arbor Mist I drank in those days. I can still see the stars in the Coldwater sky.

Sometimes, I am a new mother again, as yet unplagued by a ghost, unaware that one day little Dusty won’t have this connection with me anymore. Every day is much like the one before it, washing diapers by hand in the morning and strapping the baby to my chest to take a walk around the soybean field in North Carolina every evening. I wrote a poem about the soybeans. It was a beautiful one.

Occasionally I find myself a zealous teen, suiting up in the uniform of the fast food industry, riding down the road with my mother to go earn some money, laughing with my co-workers, and feeling tickled pink when someone from my church ends up ordering from me.

More often than I would admit, though, the wind takes me back to the place I’ll call Devil’s Bones, standing outside with Snake while he smokes a cigarette and spouts the most far-fetched shit you’ve ever heard and laughing at himself the whole time. Sixteen years old, making mistakes. Twenty, learning to forgive myself. Twenty-eight, trying to find the light that I had back when I was sixteen.

He has a metronome in his head.

Constantly keeping time, keeping everything in line - it gets warped sometimes, too. These last ten years have stretched into many lifetimes of nothingness, the same monotonous cycles of half-hearted effort and rejection; but really, he still feels a vaguely shocking sense of disbelief at being almost 30 on those mornings he wakes up in bed alone again.

But life goes on, you know? The metronome keeps going, sometimes really slowly and echoey, and sometimes so fast it feels like a buzzing in the frontal lobe of his brain. Until it gets sucked into the dense blackness that lies in the pit of his existence, of course.

One day the timekeeper will stop keeping time, and he will finally be able to sleep in silence.

Devil’s Bones is most like the wind - it hasn’t much changed. They took down the pool that I never got to swim in, but the kitchen is still hung with unfinished drywall. Books still stand in precarious stacks around the corners of the halls, the computer upstairs still lives and breathes video games. Snake’s room is still painted black — I worried it wouldn’t be anymore.

The wind takes me there, some days, under the tree in the back yard with the school bus pulling away down the street. Sometimes I wonder where the wind takes him.

Today has been one of those days when the wind blows just the right way when the world for just a moment feels like 2008. I can close my eyes and feel arms around me. Snake? God? It doesn’t really matter either way. I know that I am loved.