Why Is It Called Fall When Everything Goes Sideways?

Wind used to be my least favorite type of weather.

Rachel, Jen, Ben and I went down to the lake today to take pictures of the pier for a painting Rachel and I want to do for our living room. We drove over the wet fingers of sand reaching into the parking lot, turned off our cars and stepped out to a racing, wet, sandy wind, the kind that makes it hard to open the car door and easy to shut it. We ran out past the rickety fences to the water and took some pictures, keeping the camera to the north side of our bodies to keep it dry. The wind was shaping large, messy waves that were way out of line (coming from Encinitas, I'm used to waves cooperating to create long shoulders upon which a surfer could easily ride, not this carnage I've been seeing on
 the west coast of Michigan. That said, I did happen to spot two brave (or oblivious) wetsuited surfersattempting a paddle-out straight into the wind). Everything was going sideways. The whistling wind licked water from the tops of the waves and mixed it in with the rain. Sand whipped us in the ankles and continued its current down the beach to the foot of the pier.

What a force the wind is. Nothing can stop it! The trees are an interesting thing to look at in the wind. The trunk is closely attached to roots, which hold it in place pretty well. The branches are more flexible and usually bend and sway to the wind. And then the leaves are dancing or fighting, hanging on to their tree until some of them are blown away and go who-knows-where.

We had a great rest of our day. We went to the library and floated between aisles looking at books. We stopped by Starbucks and split a coffee (compliments of family in CA who generously sent us a gift card). Sitting there, we played tic-tac-toe and one of our favorite games where you slide an object across the table and see if you can get part of it to hang over the edge without it falling off. Rachel drove us home to practice on my stick shift. We enjoyed a simple dinner of left-over pasta. We began our painting. We laughed. We we ran out of paint. We went to bed and watched a movie from Redbox. I think I like this windy weather; any thing small and held to nothing is likely to be taken along with the wind to be where it pleases.