JOY ALONG THE WAY: LISTENING TO WHERE THE WIND BLOWS ON HIGH

Last week we had one of those winds which I call a high wind. I don't mean a fast wind but one that is literally high. You can hear it, way up in the sky, as it goes roaring along but you can't see nor feel any effects of it on the ground. No trees around here are tall enough to be affected. It is an auditory puzzle, surreal. I describe it as nature laying a sound blanket over us.

I hear this wind only several times a year. Maybe it comes more often and I have the TV going full blast and thus miss it.

Sometimes I think I would like to have become a meteorologist so I'd know more accurately about the cause for wind directions and their appropriate names. But I've never made an in-depth study of them other than they are all created by warm air meeting cool air. I've just settled to accrue my knowledge, hit or miss, as it comes to me, a process I call the Nicodemus style whereby he was told, You don't know where it (the wind) might come from nor where it will go.' For example, I learned what the Trade Winds are from that lovely old song which contains the musical phrase, "down where the trade winds blow." sung by Crosby or Como, it aroused in me a love for that part of our world which I thought must be like paradise. So, I sought knowledge of the Trade Winds. Learning, meteorologically, that trade winds were those that, in the northern hemisphere flow from the northeast toward the warm equatorial air and in the southern hemisphere flow from the southeast, combined with the rotation of the earth, create favorable winds to move the ships along on the ocean waters, ships bearing their precious cargoes of silks and spices. Somehow all that meteorological knowledge took away from me the romance of down where the trade winds blow and reduced my fervor to learn about winds.

I'm sure that when I first encountered the word, Chinook, as in "A Chinook sweeping down the eastern side of the Rockies ..." I hurriedly consulted the dictionary to find out if a Chinook was a person or a flock of mountain goats, "A warm breeze causing a rapid rise in the temperature," said the OED.

I have mentally constructed a glossary of my own concerning winds. There is the www winds, in no way connected with the World Wide Web but short for the Window Washing Wind. It is a wind that drives a rain onto the window glass hard enough to make the bird messes disappear. I'd like this wind more if some inventor would come up with windows that had invisible wipers installed in the frames that would be activated to wipe the glass, much as our auto windshield wipers.

Then there is my Frozen Motion Wind. This frozen motion of the wind can be seen in the little piles of dirt, dead leaves it drives into some corner of the house or at the foot of a fence and deposits them there. It is more beautifully discernible in the sleek snow drifts that sweep upward and leave a sharp, curling edge. I see this along the hedgerow where the wind-driven snow meets the obstacle of undergrowth and changes its current in long, graceful, sculptured, crystal to make a Kilroy-like statement, "Wind was here."

My Laid Wind is, of course, no wind at all, but when I first heard form Grandma and Grandpa that the wind was laying or had laid. I hurried outside to see what egg-like kind of thing it was depositing on the ground.

REJOICE!*

Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime resident of Cape Girardeau.