Wind: an Essay

This is part of the online collection of essays about different wild animals

When she wasn’t turning the pages of an old magazine or flipping the television on and then giving up, she was listening.  And what she heard was the wind in the big, stiff leaves of a palm tree with green and yellow coconuts all bunched in around the leaves just like the center of a flower.  And the sound was lovely. 

First the wind ruffled the little, lighter leaves. Then if it was strong enough the breeze pushed through the stiff fronds and rattled the back of each one, just a little. Sometimes a golf cart came whirring past, sometimes a bird came close to the second-floor patio black, wooden rail and landed with a rustle.

But when the wind really blew, hard enough that the palm outside the window waved and made all kinds of different shapes, you couldn’t hear the singular palm anymore, you heard all the leaves everywhere shiver and roar and then it died down, just like an orchestra and then you could hear the individual leaves again, like someone was gently rattling a stick along a fence, if children even do that anymore.

It was a soft wind, full of leaf-damp air and the birds that came to sit on dead branches of the plumeria found a better spot and the plumeria continued to bow and nod to the palm tree in an agreeable way, and my grandmother When the sun came through the billowing clouds, the palm tree fronds looked like green glass, or as if they’d been carefully polished.