And So It Blows

Daybreak came early as it has been these days in May, and I was not particularly excited about getting out from under my warm blankets. I headed eastward toward my Refuge facing a gloriously sunny day. Rearing up on the eastern horizon was a rim of suspiciously dark clouds. I know the earth turns toward the east and eventually those clouds would sweep overhead and blot out the sun. And sure enough, before the day was over the sky was gray. Not one drop of rain fell!
Sixty first-grade kids could handle that. They took turns inside a little wooden building we call our Bird Blind, inside the canvas teepee, or under six foot high sagebrush, or inside our fabulous new Education Center so it wasn’t as if they had to suffer the thirty mile an hour dust storm in the open for five hours. Except that the wind blew from the west-northwest right across the water which seemed to cool the air below the thermometer reading. Birds managed to fly through it all, baby kestrels squawked when mama left them, and blackbirds peeked around the phragmites, not wanting to get pushed around any more than I did.
How could I complain? Poor me. I was stuck inside the classroom showing differences between the five classes of vertebrates. Do you remember, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals? The story of evolution was never so welcome because it kept me out of the wind.
With the continuous turning of the world fun was over and the kids took off on their big yellow bus. We enclosed our teaching aids in plastic tubs to be used on yet another day. In no time at all I drove westward with the sun in my face at about the same angle as it was six hours past. Now the sun is preparing to slip off the opposite side of the sky but the wind still blows. It is past time the wind took the hint and slowed down to rest.
Naomi Sherer