It's windy today
It's windy today. The ocean churns with muck and sand, with the dead things that are pulled to the surface on a rough day. It blows my hair across my face and tickles my skin, sways palm trees, tugs at the edges of my clothes, sends leaves scuttling for cover. The sky is hidden behind clouds the colour of the pale blue hydrangeas that grow in Victoria back home.
I've just finished work for the day, and instead of heading for home as I usually do I've packed myself a lunch and settled down at the beach for a few hours to get some writing done. I have my earbuds, a bottle of water. A sweatshirt from The Hudson Bay Company that has the name of my birth country across the front in red. It's my favourite.
I'm lucky it's windy. Wind makes the kite surfers crawl out from their cracks and crevices, and today main beach is alive with blue and black sails criss-crossing the waves. They zip across the water, splashing through the grey surf which roils with frothy chaos and uncontrollable beauty. Occasionally, one of the kite surfers will catch a particularly strong wind or the right angle on a wave and are thrown maybe five metres in the air. They spin, land, and continue as if nothing had ever happened. I am entirely fascinated.
I watch them until I finish my lunch, fending off hungry seagulls the entire time. I accidentally drop a crumb and the birds attack like a mob of fans attacking a celebrity. When I finish and there is nothing more for them to steal, they move onto other unfortunates who thought they could eat their lunch in peace.
I pull my novel up and start writing. Gentle piano floods into one ear through my earbud, the roar of the ocean in the other. My foot is falling asleep, but I am safe from the sun in the sheltered hut I have claimed for a few hours. Tourists and locals alike wander past. I am entirely alone, but I am not lonely. This is my town, and in moments like this I feel as if I have roots that have dug deep into the sand and soil and surf and have anchored me here to this time and place. This is my town, and I am lucky it's windy today.
What do you do when it's windy out?
I've just finished work for the day, and instead of heading for home as I usually do I've packed myself a lunch and settled down at the beach for a few hours to get some writing done. I have my earbuds, a bottle of water. A sweatshirt from The Hudson Bay Company that has the name of my birth country across the front in red. It's my favourite.
I'm lucky it's windy. Wind makes the kite surfers crawl out from their cracks and crevices, and today main beach is alive with blue and black sails criss-crossing the waves. They zip across the water, splashing through the grey surf which roils with frothy chaos and uncontrollable beauty. Occasionally, one of the kite surfers will catch a particularly strong wind or the right angle on a wave and are thrown maybe five metres in the air. They spin, land, and continue as if nothing had ever happened. I am entirely fascinated.
I watch them until I finish my lunch, fending off hungry seagulls the entire time. I accidentally drop a crumb and the birds attack like a mob of fans attacking a celebrity. When I finish and there is nothing more for them to steal, they move onto other unfortunates who thought they could eat their lunch in peace.
I pull my novel up and start writing. Gentle piano floods into one ear through my earbud, the roar of the ocean in the other. My foot is falling asleep, but I am safe from the sun in the sheltered hut I have claimed for a few hours. Tourists and locals alike wander past. I am entirely alone, but I am not lonely. This is my town, and in moments like this I feel as if I have roots that have dug deep into the sand and soil and surf and have anchored me here to this time and place. This is my town, and I am lucky it's windy today.
What do you do when it's windy out?
This is such a lovely piece of writing! I really relate to feeling like your roots are deep in your town. It's almost always windy where I live, and I kind of miss it when we go somewhere it's not.
ReplyDeleteThanks Opal! It's funny how you can miss the strangest things, isn't it? Thanks for commenting!
DeleteI like the narrative style you chose for this post! It's funny that you're writing about this, because it's been fairly windy here lately, too (like, up to 26 miles per hour, which is like 42 km per hour) and it KEEPS ME UP AT NIGHT AND THUS IS NOT NEARLY AS BEAUTIFUL AS YOUR WRITING HERE.
ReplyDeleteThanks Heather! I had a lot of fun writing it. Goodness, that's fast! I can totally get how annoying that would get and I HOPE YOU GET SOME SLEEP HEATHER.
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