The winds of autumn

Last night the wind blew in.

Sometimes in the last of summer or the earliest months of autumn we get an odd sort of east wind. The winter winds that blow off the interior are frightful and frigid; they usually meet our Pacific rain in a head-on collision of ice and snow, plunging the Portland region into a Dantesque Hell of fearsome roads and fearful drivers.

These are not those winds.

Instead, the late-summer winds clear out the skies and crispen the air. Temperatures drop into the pleasant seventies, the nights are sleep-cool and the days brisk and autumnal. Moribund leaves, already drying and turning, pile in drifts along fences and at the base of walls. Crows scud overhead in playful bands trying tricks that only the strong winds allow them.

We don't enjoy the autumn wind every year, so it was with a deep, slow satisfaction that I roused in the night last night to hear the soughing of the trees above the roof and the faint singing of the street-wires that announced the arrival of our occasional visitor from the East.

This morning was everything that a wind-morning should be; crackling with cold, bright and vivid, the gustlets whisking the steam from my coffee cup as I stood in the long shadows anticipating the arrival of the day.

The wind through my heart
blows all my candles out.
In my heart and its rooms is dark and windy.
From the mantle smashes birds’ nests, teacups
full of stars as the wind winds round,
a mist of sorts that rises and bends and blows
or is blown through the rooms of my heart
that shatters the windows,
rakes the bedsheets as though someone
had just made love.

~ Deborah Digges