By Susan Tomlinson

I had returned from a class and found an email alert from my bank waiting for me, citing “irregular activity” in my account. It seems that while I was busy teaching, a stranger had stolen nearly a thousand dollars from me by purchasing three plane tickets. I spent the next two hours or so between classes on the phone and at the bank, filing a fraud report and changing account numbers. Fortunately for me, the bank has promised to replace the money. Even so, it was mildly unsettling.

When I finally made it to my next class, it was already in progress. The Tuesday afternoon class is one that I team teach, and during the forty minutes I was on hold on the phone with the bank, I had emailed my colleague to alert him that I might be a few minutes late. It happened that it was J’s turn to lecture anyway, and so I wasn’t especially worried about arriving with class already underway. I tried to slip in quietly, but apparently J had told the students why I was absent, and as soon as they saw me, the lecture stopped and the questions started. Their concern was palpable and sweet. When the lecture resumed, I attempted to pay attention, but my mind kept wandering back to the theft. I wasn’t upset, exactly, but I felt distracted and slightly out of sync with the world.

Later, we went outside to traipse up and down Yellow House Draw, shooting bearings and counting paces to see if we could arrive at the destinations we’d mapped out inside the classroom. We came to a point that J had plotted for the students to find, and it was the charred earth of a controlled burn, a tidy, round, gray spot devoid of plant life. This led to questions about the purpose of controlled burns on a prairie and to questions about prairies in general, and so I was briefly brought back from my distracted state so that I could talk about one of my favorite subjects. Then we were on to our next point, somewhere up the road.

As the students marked their paces, I lingered, strolling slowly up the path behind them. It was a very windy day. We teach our students to estimate wind speed by using the Beaufort Scale so that they can include it in their journal logs, and earlier one of them had informed me that it was probably blowing 20-30 miles an hour. I was pleased that she and the other students were putting the scale to work; it is a handy guide, and fairly accurate. But if you grow up in these parts, as I did, and you pay any sort of attention at all to the weather, you don’t really need Admiral Beaufort’s guide to know how hard the wind is blowing on a given day. You simply know what 20-30 miles per hour feels like. You know how it tugs at your hair and buffets your skin. You know that an errant gust at just the right moment of footfall can nudge you slightly askew. You know that you are going to have to hold your skirt down with both hands when you step out of the house.

When I was much younger, I used to despair of the wind. No, despair is too soft a word, for truly I hated it. I found its relentless voice tortuous and maddening, like an incessant talker in the room that we wish would just… shut…up. But I am much older now, with more than half a lifetime of wind behind me, pushing me along, just as it pushed me today. And like any long-term acquaintances, our lives have intersected countless times, and we in turn have grown intertwined, this wind and I.

It has been an uneasy start to the year. First my father’s death, and then the frantic scramble to catch up from missing the opening week of classes, and dealing with the continuing elder care of my mother, and now this theft. I was thinking of this as I stopped at the top of the ridge and looked out over Yellow House Draw. The wind shimmied and waved through the ochre grass in the arroyo below. And up on the ridge it slipped all around me through those same prairie grasses, and the sound was parsed into a thousand familiar voices, all tender toward me, all in gentle harmonic conversation with me.

It was not peace, exactly, that I was feeling right then, but something richer than peace, and fuller even than calm. These words, peace and calm, imply that there are no storms at all, that there are not other kinds of winds that buffet us, other gusts that knock us askew as we travel. Storms are part of the world in which we reside, however, and perhaps what we should hope for when we turn our faces into them is not a feeling of peace, because that implies that we are oblivious to the things that challenge us. Perhaps what we should hope for is what I was feeling right at that moment, there on that windy ridge. I think the closest word I can use to describe it would be “steadiness.” The wind, my old companion, was propping my unsettled self up and holding it, steady.

Image source: author's collection.

Susan Leigh Tomlinson blogs regularly at The Bicycle Garden. She has a forthcoming book, How to Keep a Naturalist's Notebook (Stackpole).