Windy Days

I have seen many comments from friends talking about the wind and how creepy or how dirty it is. It is exactly the opposite for me as I sit here this evening with a good book (courtesy of Kailey's ever-growing library) and listen to the wind beat against the house.

I'm not sure if it is the sound, the smell, the feel of the wind when I walk outside or the way that it suffocates out all of the day-to-day white noise that causes the feeling of security I always feel when it is stormy out. I know that sounds contradictory, but the wind and rain always remind me of when I was little and the quiet calm of driving through either the stormy weather or the stormy obstacles of my life. And then I hear a song, Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World" and I feel as though I'm sitting back in the old (then new) Mercury Sable, driving home from visiting my grandparents in Idaho.

Why I always think of that trip in particular, I don't know. There was nothing noteworthy about it. It was just my parents, my brother, our new puppy named Bandit and me. It seems like so many of our trips home were either driven at night or during a storm and this drive was no different. It was late night, there was a steady rain and I could hear the windshield wipers swishing. Andrew and I were in the backseat practicing singing in a gravelly Louis Armstrong voice as the demo tape with maybe 10 songs played on repeat through the night. I also seem to remember a stretch of time where nobody said a thing. We all rode in a comfortable silence, lost in our thoughts and listening to the music.

So, although the wind seems horrible to so many others, it truly soothes my soul and brings me peace. I don't think of the wind as a storm, but more like a blanket of security, blocking out all of the extraneous and superfluous white noise while I allow myself to get lost in my nostalgia.