Wounded Spring

Yesterday was quintessentially Kansas weather. Strong south winds moved in moisture and warm temperatures. I can think of nothing about Kansas I love more than the powerful winds bringing enormous weather changes.

My horses and I share a restlessness when the winds rise.  Horses must smell distant places.  Their gentle spirits suffering the long confinement of domestication desire to run freely to the clarion call in the warming wind. 

For me, the winds call up the long-ago and brief days of my childhood when my parents were living - young and strong and still in love with their lives. My mother's sheer curtains rose and fell in perfect accord with the rising melody of the first spring wind. The graceful lift of fabric made the wind visible and comforting and lovely.

Yesterday was such a day. I opened the windows and doors in greeting to the south wind, welcome in all the years of my life. I recalled the comfort of those early happy days, now so long ago.  For a short while I ignored the troubling changes in weather and timing.  I chose not to grieve the vast lost expanse of an unimaginable prairie.  I forgot that spring sometimes falters without rain, that the earliest and most welcome blossoms are killed in a cruel freeze.  I forgot that in some years spring is wounded and I simply accept the loss.