"Listen to th' wind wutherin' round the house," she said. "You could bare stand up on the moor if you was out on it tonight."
Mary did not know what 'wutherin' meant until she listened, and then she understood. It must mean that hollow shuddering sort of roar which rushed round and round the house, as if the giant no one could see were buffeting it and beating at the walls and windows to try to break in."
~ Frances Hodgson Burnett The Secret Garden
As I sit writing this the wind is wutherin' at the windows and doors. The last couple of weeks have seen wind storms that shake the windows, bend the willows to their knees, and knock birds head over tail feathers in the air. The clearing behind the houses is strewn with branches and twigs of all sizes - some probably not even our own but blown from neighbours. And an old dead tree that I have grown to love over the summer, its whitening branches and trunk bedecked with a colourful ivy, has fallen. The roar of the wind is fairly constant and, at night especially, the wind bawls and beats the house with a variety of knocks and thuds and rasps that leads you to believe that it doesn't like being out in the dark either and would love to come in. Last night the wind whimpered and whined and scratched in a way that sent my husband outside looking for what we were sure must be a frightened and lost dog.
I grew up on the Prairies and there, rather than the occasion of a wind storm, the wind blew almost constantly. It was an uninterrupted tug - at your clothing, at your face - buffeting at your ears and blowing your wind-tattered hair almost from your scalp. Its wild thrust through wheat fields and tall prairie grasses was as insistent as the waves plunging up the shores of the Bay of Fundy. Its pitch was higher and it always sang lonely.
Out there the wind almost always blew in one direction - once it decided what direction that was. It was not in the habit of changing its mind and shifting course. Here at Fat Hummingbird Farm the wind most often gallops down North Mountain. But, with these wind storms, the wind careens from north to south then east to west, swirls in on itself in tight eddies, blows down to the ground then up a tree to the sky again. It is like a maddened cat with a firecracker tied to its tail. And just as spitting mad. Or perhaps one could say it dances the equally maddened pace of a tarantella - grabbing the pendulant arms of the willow and whirling them into a frenzy.
There are so many sorts of wind:
bise, mistral, bora, brickfielder, southerly buster, buran, sirocco, khamseen, gibli, xlokk,
fohn, chinook, moazagoatl, zoned, saloon, etesians, shamal, trade winds,
tehuantepecer, williwaw, willy-willy
and of course Newfoundland's Wreakhouse wind.
There is a beautiful description of winds in Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient that I have always savoured reading over and over. Poet Wallace Steven's shortest poem is to the roaring wind:
What syllable are you seeking,
Vocalissimus,
In the distances of sleep?
Speak it.
Painters Monet and Gauguin both painted the Mistral wind, a strong cold northwesterly wind that blows from southern France into the Gulf of Lion in the northern Mediterranean.
The wind that is, at this moment, wutherin' at the doors and windows of what is proving to be our very solid house, does not have a fancy name - a name that invokes charm or mystery or even a kind of voodoo. But this wind is an artist, a painter - plastering forms and shapes and light upon our windows, finding expression for its wild bluster.
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