Who Has Seen the Wind?

Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you:
But when the leaves hang trembling,
The wind is passing through.
 
Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I:
But when the trees bow down their heads,
The wind is passing by.
 
Christina Rossetti

Lines my Victorian-loving father recited to me.   Today, winds waft in from the Southwest forming greedy tongues on the surface of Quilcene Bay.  High tide surges in as if  pushed by an eager parent sending a child on a swing.  Waves carry fallen logs snatched along shorelines, and those logs are cradles rocking recklessly on the incoming tide. If this January tide is high enough, logs will be battering rams to wipe out our driftwood fence, falling each picket like a domino collapsing its neighbor.  Then the waters will laugh through the gaps and surge across the lawn, all the way to our front deck.  In past years, we have looked over the deck’s railing at roiling salt water.  We looked down and held our waiting breath for ebb tide to return.

 In the surrounding woods, cedars and Douglas Firs dance as if the band won’t take a break.  Ferns lean over, revealing under fronds like girls who toss their hair over their heads to dry in the sun.  There is no sunshine today.  January 2, 2021 blows in the New Year, and I am celebrating fresh air.  Barring a brittle alder limb crashing over my head as I walk the trails, and ignoring the threat the power could go out in the cabin, I am having fun.

                When my daughter was between three and six-years-old, together we took Windy Day Walks, usually on October afternoons, another gusty month in the Pacific Northwest.  Holding hands and skip-walking among falling leaves and plopping acorn hats, we recited Winnie the Pooh’s winter poem titled, simply, “Pooh’s Poem” in which my little girl played Piglet to my Pooh:

The more it snows, Tiddely Pom
The more it goes, Tiddely Pom 
The more it goes, Tiddely Pom
On snowing.
And nobody knows, Tiddely Pom
How cold my toes, Tiddely Pom
How cold my toes, Tiddely Pom
                      Are growing.                         

My daughter was always on cue with her tiddely poms increasing with exuberance as if we were a pas de deux.  I confess that I devised the game to encourage us to get exercise on a windy day.  She might have enjoyed more to stay indoors with Sesame Street.  Poetry, a line and refrain, kept one skipping foot ahead of another until we were around a half dozen blocks and back home sipping tea.  

     “Who can see the wind / neither you nor I. ” Yes, unseen forces inspire  our imagination.  Today’s wind is the brushwork of the creative God, reminding me on this second day of a New Year the immensity of forces surrounding me.  I am never alone in the woods or on the waters.  I might as well have fun and inhale all the fresh air of a New Year.