Alone, reading. I'm distracted by street sounds and calls of young boys playing handball in the vacant lot across the way. All the sounds blend together. Yet there was something else that caught my attention, something overwhelming.What is it?
Every element of my senses heightens and intensifies. My eardrums swell as I strain to hear. I check to see if they are perturbing out the side of my head---the sensation is so strong. I'm intrigued! My ears are perked like an animal's alerted to some new experience.
I stared at the pale tiled floor and motes of dust sprinkled along the corners of the room. Scanning the floor, as if looking for some precious thing just out of sight, my gaze drifted to the curtained window. Through the delicate cloth a shaft of sunlight illuminated the room suddenly. I shut my eyes quickly against its brightness. The beam of light probed the room as if for some investigative purpose and then quickly left as it came.
The room darkened. I opened my eyes in time to see the balcony curtains floating gently down against the opened space. I watched them twist and twirl and then ripple slowly back to their original position. Suddenly, as if snatched up and pulled tightly by an unseen giant, the curtains whirled and twisted and waved outside. Then once again they slackened, gently billowed and hung loosely inside the room.
I sat watching this enchanted dance, while I strained to hear the allusive sound. The sound of the wind blowing through fields of tall white cotton, or over tops of oak or moss ladened trees in the backwoods of Mississippi, or rustling softly through the branches of a weeping willow in summer.
On Third Avenue in the Bronx in a third floor apartment, the sound of the wind is not so distinctive.
The wind traces its movements through sight, sound and effect. I've seen whirlwinds that swirl dust, debris and gravel to great heights in New York City. I've witnessed the enchanting dance of balcony sheers. I've experienced the soundless motion of the wind.
Have you seen it?