Blow Winds Blow

The woman stretches on the couch in the family room. Her husband is out playing tennis, and as she sits alone, savoring the silence, she sips tea and studies the big backyard oak as it drops its yellow leaves. "Before canvas and pigments and frames and wives asking husbands to help hang pictures," she muses, "there was all this beauty that inspired people to find ways to capture it." It's barely 10 in the morning, and with nothing on the calendar prodding her, she leans back into the pillows. Her eyes soften, and her breaths slow. Spent leaves continue to flutter and land on the lawn, and she fills with tenderness towards the forces of nature.

"Fall leaves in Massachusetts were always abundant, too," she recalls with the warmth of nostalgia. As she continues to sit and watch Autumn taking over in Virginia, she flashes back to the crackly piles she shuffled through as a kid on her way back and forth to school. On Saturday mornings, bundled in her red sweater, she'd outrun her sisters to stand alongside her father and help rake leaves out to the curb. She remembers the satisfaction of mounding up a pile and chuckles as she recalls having to stop and stare at her hands to figure out why they were stinging. Blisters were undoubtedly a downside to family leaf-burning sessions. And there was that once when she jumped trustingly into a big leafy pile and badly bruised the tip of her tailbone, a memory that still brings a smile to her face. 

The rush of wind blowing leaves off the trees outside snaps the woman back to the present. She feels a kinship here, curls up her legs, adjusts the pillows, and leans back to study the show. At first, she likens the leaves tumbling down to snowfall, but the more she looks, she realizes that big, blowy gusts are the key players here. Showers of leaves are at the point of readiness. Everywhere, they surrender to heaving puffs and, like confetti, fly. She's lived through decades of autumns, but today, these witness moments spark a conversation. She doesn't hear any words, but some unspoken message causes her to close her eyes and let the power of the morning's windfall settle in. 

A notification on the woman's cellphone startles her. She's got an upcoming appointment, but there's still plenty of time for another cup of tea. At the sink to refill the kettle, she frowns at the top-heavy barrel tipped over and rolling around at the end of the driveway. Last week, her husband went wild pruning, and now, tangled vines and lengths of leggy branches spill out of the overstuffed trashcans. As she waits for her teabag to steep, she studies the mess. "Unwieldy, unwanted bunches of summer," she says to herself. She hesitates in front of the refrigerator door, nearly forgetting what she needs, and then snags a drop of milk to put in her tea. 

The following day, she catches her husband's yawn as he reads the paper on the couch, and as she grabs a section to snuggle in and join him, she looks twice out of the family room windows. Limbs that had bowed bounced and whipped just a day ago stand motionless now in the morning sun. Where are the gusts that performed so lavishly for her before? Perhaps the wind died down naturally or, like fickle friends, moved on to another audience. She's still here, jazzed for commotion, and the room's fixed order, the stillness in the air outside the window's panes, prods a mocking betrayal.

She pivots to the kitchen, swings open the refrigerator door, and, as if newly sighted, sweeps leftovers that have died the death of neglect onto the counter. She tosses a forgotten carton of almond milk, a moldy jar of salsa, and the yogurt containers left behind half eaten. Like a whirlwind, she pulls out the glass shelves, scrubs them in the sink, and scours sticky drips inside the fridge with an old toothbrush. Ideas sprout as she wields the dishtowel and wipes everything down. "I'll move these small shelves over to make room for tall bottles. Pnut butter belongs here with the jelly, olive jars with pickles, and I'll consolidate these three jars of mustard into one." These thoughts fly as she tramples through streams of water from the draining bins, now dampening the floor. 

Withered parsley, weeping mushrooms, and spent lettuce join the soggy zucchini she throws in the trashcan. Just as Nature models paths to recreation, so does the disposal whirl like a tornado when she flips the switch. She'd thought she might make soup, but the force of yesterday's wind had been contagious; there's a rightness to the fury that rids her of all these summer spoils. Many leaves outside her window have yet to blow, but as she listens to the whir, she stands, knowing that to renew the face of the earth, all of it - all of it must go.

Blow Winds Blow