wind

I want to know this: why does the wind always work against you when you’re biking? And why has it been so windy these past days (weeks?) anyway?

Appointments and office chores kept me in town today. That's not a complaint. Madison is a good place to be on a warm May day.





Still, I like the sound of that – "kept me in town," as if I had a country residence to consider in the alternative.

But in some small way, I do: in the late afternoon, I take the bike out to Ed’s farmette (some fifteen miles away if you mainly use the bike trail). The wind is brutal, but I tell myself it’s good practice for navigating a sandstorm or typhoon (minus the rain), should the need ever arise for me to navigate a sandstorm or typhoon. With a river running through it.






Ed has taken on the challenge of making my workspace at the farmhouse maximally comfortable.





Being mechanically talented, he has even dug out an antique b&w TV and made it work. Of course, I should ignore it in favor of work, but still, on the off chance that I run out of papers to read...

Remarkably, Ed hasn't noticed that my hair is no longer the golden shimmer of a childhood recollection. I prod him -- what do you think? Kind of squirrel colored, isn’t it?  Ed looks at it now, seemingly with due consideration. The wind is tossing it around madly. I'm thinking it must be like the tangled mane of a donkey. Looks great! -- he tells me, and I truly think he means it, in the same way that you may think that the color of anything out there on the planet is great, merely by virtue of it being  a color at all.


By evening, we pack up and head back into town. With a few clipped branches of lilac, and stems of lily-of-the-valley -- their fragrance so strong, that you would almost think them to be artificial. Except that they're not.