written a few days ago...

I've decided that I miss the luxury of having internet access right down the hall. Perhaps I can blame my lack of writing on that... On the other hand, I am doing more than I was a year ago, am actually engaged in the process of living we all go on so often about, with all its pains and glories however small. Real life happens outside one's head. Or is it one's reaction to what happens outside one's self? In either case, nothing (or moderatly little) real happens without being in the outside.

It's windy out today. Great gusts of a warm rampant wind play across the valley, the dropped and forgotten playthings of the storm that passed through last night. The leaves from the sycamore trees are being tosses helter skelter across the soggy lawns, danced across patios under fallen umbrellas and down sidewalks to be unceremoniously trod upon by the passing student. The sky is moody, bright blue in patches, white clouds - fluff and nothings really - in others, then dark and sullen at being herded against the mountains by the winds, only to be broken up and sent flying by the same wind (or perhaps a relative).

The sound of the wind cause my memory to belie the heat and stuffiness of the small crowded room. I am no longer here, but in a dark and sleeping house. It is mid-winter and bitterly cold. The moonlight is bright enough to make the thick shadow of the house a looming blackness on the piled snow. I feel so very small looking out the breath-fogged window at the white uneven fields, streaching out into inky nothing beyond the end of sight. The wind blows, rising and falling, whistling around corners, driving against walls and drifts, shaking and bending the dead dried stems of the grasses that grew up at the edge of the porch low to the ground. The tones of its the moaning send shivers down my arms and I can all too easily imagine the cries and wailings of those lost on the empty plains before me. But now I have exchanged the cold piercing wind for one hot and rough and the sounds of quietude and rest in a sleeping house for the rattle and grating of conversation, trying to worry objections into oblivion.

And now the wind has gone and all is still. Neither leaf nor petal is ruffled. The very silence of it would weigh were it not that I too am still.