I walk and sometimes I am buffeted and sometimes I can fly

My shoulders released a yoke I never knew was burdening them.

These days have been curious.

I have bicycled with gloves, a scarf and a wool jacket one day and a jean jacket thrown open two days later. I have bicycled in stillness and sun and have pedaled with all my might into headwinds, that, no matter which direction I turned from the route I was headed including about face, still seemed to be opposing me. The wind is a trickster. The wind is always ahead of me, and yet I am shoved at from behind, thrust at from the left and from the right, with no object about to accomplish this but the wind, invisible but for the particles it lifts and hefts.

kmmm,/****************************************************************************************************************8

Those are Petey’s comments. I thought I’d keep them in since he seemed quite adamant in his delivery.

In the beginning of this year during which we are spending most of the time physically isolated from the each other, I noticed a proliferation of neighbors walking their dogs. For several months I noticed this. And reports are that, indeed, lots of people went and adopted a pet. That is good! The incidence of neighbors walking their dogs seems to have lessened of late. Why? Too, my neighborhood is largely one of properties that have yards, ranging from postage stamp size to large enough to have a second house constructed on the property. And a substantial number of them have been constructing fences around their lots. So, doing some reasoning, I am thinking that many of us have become enervated by this enforced diminishment of public congeniality (only 10 people allowed at one time in a private house-what happens with my friend, Jack’s family of 14 children(?); no more than 25 persons at a time in a 1000 square foot restaurant; pick up your library books outside the back door during a specified hour call when you get there during your appointed hour and a librarian will bring it out, hang it on the door handle and go back in, then you may collect it, and bring the books home to read; no going to the cafe to have a coffee and baked good and leisurely read because you are allowed 45 minutes-tops! to linger), and dog-people have chosen to open the back door and let the dog run around in the fenced-in outback, rather than bother to rise from before the screen/monitor, clothe themselves in outside-appropriate garb and step out. This is purely my conjecture!! But no one is entering my house to refute me, and neither am I entering theirs to defend my hypothesis.

So the wind. Today I walked 7 miles into its face. It was projected. It is a day that my weather app says, temperature 50 degrees farenheit, feels like 43 degrees farenheit. Weather app. Who’d have thunk? Twenty years ago I laughed behind my hand at a friend’s husband who clicked the remote onto the Weather Channel several times in a day. In those days I would rise in the morning, after listening to the weather report on the radio, promptly forget what I just heard, and dress according to the season. I now do not go out without two or three times rechecking the weather app that comes with my “mobile device”. I tell myself it’s because I am going to be out there for a good length of time. When has that not been the case with me? I’ll tell you — never! So apps; cartoon clouds and raindrops, puffy clouds with or without an arc of sun and three rays poking out; instant temperature reports–you got me. And if I were to adopt a dog, well, the house we bought 14 or so years ago came with a fence around much of the backyard. I’m all set, thank you.

Here’s a poem by Vikram Seth.
With no companion to my mood,
Against the wind as it should be,
I walk, but in my solitude
Bow to the wind that buffets me

And here’s one by A.A. Milne
No one can tell me,
Nobody knows,
Where the wind comes from,
Where the wind goes.

It’s flying from somewhere
As fast as it can,
I couldn’t keep up with it,
Not if I ran.

But if I stopped holding
The string of my kite,
It would blow with the wind
For a day and a night.

And then when I found it,
Wherever it blew,
I should know that the wind
Had been going there too.

So then I could tell them
Where the wind goes…
But where the wind comes from
Nobody knows.

So as not to sit on the blues that I have saddled you with in this particular post, here is a picture from a week ago of predominant yellow. I love yellow.