The Northeast Wind

Bicycles in January

One of the best things about winter is that it dramatically changes things. One perfectly ordinary day, a bike is just a bike leaning against a fence. And then that night, the blustery northeast winds whistle round the corners of the house, rattle the windows, spur Boris (the dark cellar furnace) to work even harder. In the early morning, before I have opened my eyes, I can see the ghostly light behind the thick lace curtains and hear the deep silence of snow. There is no sound: no wind, no cars, no birds, no trucks, no voices, only the pounding of my heart in my ears.

Growing up in a small town in western New York, I have known this phenomenon all my life; except out there, the winds blow across the flat cornfields of Indiana and Illinois, pick up steam over the Great Lakes, and drop snow with a ferocity both chilling and awe-inspiring. Even here, living 450 miles away on a gentler, more temperate (for the most part) Cape Cod, I find this overnight transformation still breathtakingly wondrous.

One of my dear friends, Julie Levesque, is a talented sculptor who has used salt to cover ordinary objects like vases and books and forks and spoons to surprise our eyes, making the homey and familiar startling and magical. When I pull aside the curtain and look out at the back yard, I think a wizard has worked all night to alter maples and cedars and lilac bushes and garden chairs and rooftops and clotheslines and windows and doors and birdbaths and grills and woodpiles and outdoor showers. Altered everything to such an extent that my mind is shaken out of its lethargy, its old familiar ways of recognizing and naming things.

Nothing is as it was. Everything is new.

In one night, winter can do that. So I pull on boots, a coat, a hat, a scarf, and mittens and push my weight against the back door to open it so that I can reach outside for the old bent snow shovel. I do my own sculpting…a path down the driveway to the mailbox…and deep in that white world, I hear only my heart and the last whisperings of the northeast wind, up in Maine by now.