Cast Your Fate to the Wind How currents of air drive the currents of life

Who has seen the wind? Neither I nor you: 

But when the leaves hang trembling, 

The wind is passing through. 

Who has seen the wind? Neither you nor I: 

But when the trees bow down their heads, 

The wind is passing by. 

This was the first poem I ever memorized. For some reason, Christina Rossetti’s gentle lines caught my unformed, five-year-old imagination. I chattered them over and over, singsong, and no doubt drove my mother crazy.

Wind itself can drive you crazy. Sometimes there is a hysteria to it, a shrill tirade that goes on for days, relentless, unappeasable. Sometimes it is angry, as though Zeus sucked in his breath to roar at us. Invisible and unpredictable, wind can stroke us with a lover’s tenderness in the morning and topple our home that afternoon.

As a child, I liked Rossetti’s mischievous breezes, but by my teens, I craved a carefree wind: blasting my old Chevy Nova down the highway with no other car in sight, my friend’s feet hanging out the window, staticky car radio blaring.

As I grew older, I began to love the violence.

When the clouds puffed themselves up dark and ganged together, somersaulting like demons at play, I ran into the back yard and stood, arms outstretched, letting the air whip through my hair and buffet my face. This was my tempest, a rough magic cleansing all my worries. It was Lear, too, a swirl of all the ego’s disappointments. And it was fate, like the wind that was meant to carry Odysseus home—until his greedy crew let it loose too soon, sending the ship off to strange worlds again.

Me, I was still stuck at home, smack in the center of the Midwestern wind corridor. “There’s nothing between us and the Gulf of Mexico but the Ozark mountains,” a meteorologist once told me, “and nothing between us and the Arctic but a wire fence.” Warnings, watches, alerts, and alarms riddled every spring and summer. Sensible people got scared every time.

I scoffed. Until, in 2011, I went to Joplin. Its EF5, the seventh-deadliest tornado in world history, had twisted steel trusses, somersaulted cars, chewed up 8,000 buildings, sent cows flying through the air, and ended 161 human lives. Those who survived were slowly, painfully putting their lives back together. I came home sobered. And this past May, when a tornado barreled through my native St. Louis, I watched in a cold sweat.

Top stories were whacked off, as though a giant toddler had thrown a tantrum and knocked down his blocks. Front walls were ripped away like they were dollhouse partitions, sending beds and dressers flying into the street. All the happy plans and comforts people had surrounded themselves with were stripped from them in seconds.

I had only loved the violence when its ravages were a few dead branches. But no matter how tightly we control the rest of our lives, we live at wind’s mercy.

Yejiri Station, Province of Suruga, c. 1832, by Katsushika Hokusai, Brooklyn Museum (Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

“Without, light and invisible, but within, heavy, visible, and fixed, it is hot and moist, and tempered with fire….”

—Michael Sendovogius, New Light of Alchymie, 1650

Bit by bit, the fabric of St. Louis’s tornadoed neighborhoods is being mended. Something deep inside me settles again. These are eternal cycles. Storms gather energy and start to spin, and the wind blows upward from their center and whirls itself into a cyclone, spinning faster and faster until the force slashes it downward in a tight column, and it touches ground and shears through the landscape. If we outlast it, we go on. Until the next time.

Wind will never leave us for good.

Indiscriminate, it carries stardust and exhaust, spores and eyelashes, glitter and smog, rumors and germs. It keeps wildflowers beneath our feet and migrating geese aloft; grinds cliffs into clean white beaches and sweeps sand into giant dunes; scatters the recycling from unhinged bins. Yet until it blows, we forget that it exists.

Once summoned, wind’s presence is incontrovertible. But who summons it? Is the wind its own master? It is defined as the movement of air, its own substance. But if our sun did not heat the Earth so capriciously, there would be no temperature variations, thus no pressure gradients. Air tries to restore equilibrium by moving from high pressure areas to low, and this shift is what we name “wind.” Its temperature is taken from the land below; its moisture is drawn from the oceans and lakes it blows across. So is the wind its own master? No more than we are.

The solar wind is the most mysterious of all winds, raging far outside our awareness. It tears through interstellar space at more than a million miles per hour, dragging the sun’s magnetic field with it and shearing atmosphere from the planets. Luckily, Earth is armored like a knight, so only a few of the solar wind’s charged particles sneak through that magnetic shield. They spiral toward our poles and light the auroras, which seems a lovely gesture. But no wind can be trusted to stay balmy, and when stronger solar winds hit, their gusts zap our transformers and black us out.

Defiant and small, we send our own wind into space—where it is slowly rusting the Moon. For five days every month, like a terrible drenching period, the bits of our atmosphere sloughed into space are no longer blotted out by the sun’s stream of hydrogen particles. We have orbited between the sun and the moon, and that means our windblown oxygen can blow straight at the Moon. Unchecked, it corrodes lunar minerals into hematite, a streaky reddish brown iron oxide.

“And the whole moon became as blood,” Revelation warned.

Composition, 1930-1940, oil painting by Arnold Peter Weisz-Kubíncan (rawpixel)

“I am the formless wind that gives form to dust.^”

—Tin Ujević

Humans have been trying to understand the wind ever since its sighs blew out their first fire. Ancient Greeks imagined wind as the child of a marriage between the goddess of dawn and the god of dusk—which feels off, since wind tends to die down at sunset, but then wind is often a paradox. Sometimes a hot gasp, sometimes a soft exhale against your cheek. Sometimes pure spirit, the breath of the universe, and at other times flatulence, hot air, or blowhard arrogance. Wind’s nature is fickle, adept at seduction, quick with a con. A single gust can destroy what took years to build. Yet it is wind that keeps the world moving, wind that breathes life into a newborn or a drowned man.

Wind quickens us and keeps us alert. Inspired by aerial images of the Earth’s “skin,” the artist Anselm Kiefer said, “I heard the wind whispering in them.” In Norse mythology, an eagle perches atop the world tree and need only flap its wings to produce a powerful windstorm. The Japanese posit kamaitachi, weasel-like creatures who ride the wind and slash at travelers with their scythes. The Blackfoot Nation tells of an unlucky prairie chicken who stole the bags containing summer and winter, only to have the bags burst and release the first wind.

In her eerie, beautiful novel Helm, writer and environmentalist Sarah Hall focuses on a fierce and sublime wind that has blasted across northern England since the dawn of time. First, “Earth’s atmosphere had to stop fucking around and calm down,” she says, so Helm could be born. Soon we see the child-wind playing, and its favorite trick becomes “the Bar”: “Imagine a skater launching off a quarter pipe two thousand feet high, then somersaulting. Again. And again. And again.”

Wind’s adolescence has an erotic urgency, “flooding the valley with noise and velocity, making an impressive mess.” Yet the wind is still lonely. “The birds—nearest similar entity—don’t hang out with Helm; every time Helm wants to play they leave.” Only when humans evolve does life become interesting to Helm—because humans are interested in Helm. They acknowledge weather and adjust themselves to its vagaries; they stare up at the sky; they imagine. Also, they craft trinkets that Helm can steal. But why do they bury their dead with such trinkets? “(confusing: Helm blows away the grave soil. Nope, dead.)”

Weirder still, when Helm demolishes their homes and kills a few humans, it is “not on purpose, but they seem to take it personally.” Now they take Helm even more seriously, kneeling in gratitude if Helm blows the thunderstorms away. Soon they are speaking of Helm in ways “that are magical, abstract, woo-woo. Still not quite right, though understandable.”

After introducing various characters obsessed with the wind in different ages, Hall brings us to a contemporary scientist who is worried about microplastics congealing into clouds and stopping the wind. Helm “feels a bit wrong lately. A bit faux. Not a fraudster but, you know, not as natural, not as much unbridled brio.” Helm might have absorbed some human negativity? There is the same sense of malaise, of hopelessness, that Helm sees scrolling on our phones….

Hall’s personification is somehow soothing, even at its darkest, because wind’s truest terror is its anonymity, its random and indiscriminate destruction. We anthropomorphize, drawing Wind with puffed-out cheeks and pursed lips and trailing curly clouds. Give wind a personality, and there is a chance of prediction or persuasion. But when we confront only “violent air,” as Gaston Bachelard wrote, “we grasp elemental fury,” a raw energy that is “attached to nothing.”

And that makes humans nervous.

(public domain CC0 image)

“Cet execrable vent, if it lasts even two days more, I will hang myself.”

—A Tour Through Sicily and Malta

When Voltaire traveled to London, he saw a terrible sadness in the faces around him. Whatever was the matter, he asked. A beautiful young woman had killed herself, they said, and when he asked why, they shrugged and explained that an east wind was blowing. “That wind is the ruin of our island,” a court physician muttered. “Even the animals suffer from it.” An east wind blew when Charles I was beheaded, he added, and again when James II dethroned. “If you have some favor to ask at court, be sure to wait till the wind blows from the west or the south.”

My mother would have nodded vigorously. She was plagued by headaches her whole life, then rheumatic arthritis she swore worsened with changes in barometric pressure. She used to warn us (healthy, pain-free, bemused by her dogma) whenever a storm drew near.

Periodically, I tried to research her insistence that weather sickened her. For years, I found nothing. But mothers are always right, and now, too late to reassure her, solid empirical evidence is accumulating. I find reports of strong winds causing “neuroinflammation” and altering serotonin levels. Why would a body as sensitive, finely-tuned, and vulnerable as hers not be vulnerable to outside forces? Goethe knew: he pronounced it “a pity that just the excellent personalities suffer most.” But recent studies suggest that almost one third of us, surely not all excellent, can be thrown off by the wind. We live so much of our lives indoors that we feel impervious, but are not. The wind can work through walls.

In Ayurvedic medicine, one of the words for madness is vatula, “inflated with wind.” In traditional Chinese medicine, wind is the liveliest of the six “pernicious influences” that throw us off balance. Hippocrates said west winds made people “pale and sickly,” and left their stomachs and intestines “deranged from the phlegm that runs down into them from the head.” But in the Bible, it is the east wind that makes Jonah wish for death (Jonah 4:8). Pronounced “the wind of the Lord,” it comes “swirling down upon the heads of the wicked” (Jeremiah 23:19).

That said, the same east wind does part the Red Sea. And by the time we reach John 3:8, the wind is a gentle metaphor: it “blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”

Shakespeare gives us Ariel, an “airy spirit,” as light and fresh, quick and cool, as the north wind, to counter the hot and harmful sirocco represented by Caliban. But Shakespeare is, as usual, inconsistent; elsewhere, he blames north winds for “gout, the falling evil, itch and the ague.”

Wind exerts just enough influence, causes just enough real damage, that it can be convicted of far more deviltry than it has caused. But even if we subtract the itch and the falling evil, wind can do hellish harm. Is it any wonder every culture feels a need to name its particular winds, thus pretending to bring them under our dominion? Foehn, Brickfielder, Sharav, Levante, Karaburan, Cordonazo, Sirocco, Leveche, Chergui, Alisio, Barguzin, Kalbaishakhi, Gilavar, Chinook, Sarma, Amihan, Habagat, Papagayo, Tehuano, Tsiokantimo, Chili, Santa Ana, Ghibli, N’aschi, Sharqi, Simoom, Harmattan, Khamsin, Bayamo, Loo, Elephanta, Coromuel, Pachua, Sharkiye, Oroshi, Shamal, Bise, Karakaze, Mistral, Haboob, Bora, Brisote. I am only halfway through.

• • •

Silently apologizing to my dead mother, I read about the Foehn, a wind that churns Swiss lakes, melts ice, and loosens avalanches. As the temperature rises, humidity falls, air pressure see-saws, and positive ions increase. The air is crystalline, and you can see with unusual clarity—but that will bring you no pleasure if you suffer from Föhnkrankheit, Foehn sickness. The dramatic heating and drying of the “witches’ wind,” with its shifts in pressure and ionization, can cause headache, fatigue, anxiety, agitation, joint pain, insomnia, difficulty concentrating, and an irritability as sharp as the air.

Other winds are just as ominous. The Māori have To Hau Kai Tangata, “the wind that devours humankind.” A strong, dry nor’wester, it is believed to bring feelings of unease—and death. Argentina’s dusty, dry Zonda is thought of as the “witches’ wind,” leaving people sleepless and sad. Witches, you see, can raise or calm the wind like a symphony conductor, directing it toward their own magical purposes. The wind tells witches its secrets, and they can whip it up, bind it into knots, or use it to cast spells.

Pure fancy, of course, like the Celts’ Gaoithe Sithe, which blows when a troop of fairies passes. If you hear a loud humming, as though thousands of bees have filled the air, this means the fairies are coming, either traveling with the wind or contained within it. Next, a sudden gust will spin up hay, dust, and straw, the wind becoming visible as it plays its pranks. “God bless them,” you must say, and hope the fairies will blow some money onto the hawthorn bushes in return.

Did that ever once happen? How does folklore persist for centuries without a whit of empirical evidence, save an occasional sudden wind? The tales persist because they mean more than they say. The Gaoithe Sithe is creative and destructive at once, as is anything important to us, even madness, even love. Blurring nature and the supernatural, the fairy wind takes on agency so that somehow we might wheedle its favor. No one has ever blessed a tornado into submission—but anyone caught in its force will try.

Chinook winds are snow eaters, spiking winter temperatures by forty degrees in just a few hours. As they move east, up and down the slopes of the Rocky Mountains, they dry out and then, because dry air warms almost twice as fast as moist air, they heat up. That fast, the snow is gone, and cattle can graze again. None of today’s cows were alive, though, on January 22, 1943, when warm Chinook winds in South Dakota’s Black Hills shoved Arctic air aside and shot the temperature up by 49 degrees in two minutes, then plunged it 58 degrees. Those were confused cows. As for the humans, their windshields frosted or fogged so abruptly, they had to pull over. The windows in old Victorian houses cracked. Crowds gathered, drawn together by amazement.

So many marvels. The Sirocco comes from the hot, dry Sahara, and by the time it reaches North Africa and the Mediterranean, it is moving at hurricane speed. It picks up moisture as it crosses the Mediterranean Sea, whipping up storms as it goes, then brings clouds, fog, rain, storms, and general instability to Europe. An English traveler wrote from Italy that the Sirocco “has now blown for these six days without intermission; and has indeed blown away all our gaiety and spirits… A Neapolitan lover avoids his mistress with the utmost care at the time of the sirroc, and the indolence it inspires, is almost sufficient to extinguish every passion. All works of genius are laid aside….”

Joan Didion said the same, a century later, of the Santa Ana “devil winds”: “We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air. To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.” The world around us is pulling our strings, changing our mood, directing our actions; we are not free after all.

We envy the wind.

Fear in the Woods, 1896, by Hugo Simberg (rawpixel)

“Suddenly the dead air moved, the bare tree branches danced, shivers of excitement passed across the stray pools left from the morning’s rains. The silent solid world began to breathe.”

—Michael Clune, in Pan

What of the little winds that blow through daily life, enlivening or mussing us? I was always annoyed by dinky wind chimes, so deliberately cute, like sorority girls, with tinkling, coy, performatively silly voices I wanted to slap quiet. But one day I heard big, deep, sonorous wind chimes that took the notes of Gregorian chant, and I was overtaken. Paid an inordinate sum, extracted them from their big box, and hung them on our tree-shaded porch.

Then a storm blew up, and it sounded like a heavy metal band had lent the monks their amplifier. Oh, God. The entire neighborhood would curse us.

“We should move to Appalachia,” I told my husband. “They say wind chimes call the spirits of the dead. They couldn’t miss this summons.” We spent the next year trying to silence the chimes during storms: rubber-banding several steel tubes together; threading a towel through them; ordering a funny sponge thing with fingers meant for the purpose; and finally letting them collapse, like puppets, onto the ground. In the end, I gave up and gave them away. Courtesy, and the wind itself, had won.

It does always seem to prevail. The trick is to manage—not the wind itself, for that you would have to be Aeolus, who was both a god and a king. But to know the wind’s ways, literal or figurative, and let them carry you in the right direction. No sailor wants dead calm. But nothing makes you feel more helpless than being tossed on the waves by fierce winds, toyed with by the fates. The trick is Taoist: you must sail into the wind, not fight it. Point your boat at an angle, as close to the wind as possible without the sails collapsing, then turn into the wind, which will lift the curved sails and thrust you swiftly forward. A metaphor for crisis, that. Steer into it, however terrified you are. Let the wind bend you, and you will not break.

Unless, of course, a tornado kills you.

“When gods were young

This wind was old.”

—Edward Thomas

I am happiest when I let the wind tousle my hair like a big brother, miserable when I insist on air conditioning en route to a party. To be windblown is to be carefree, to throw caution to the winds. One of my heroes is John Muir, in part because he climbed to the top of a 100-foot Douglas spruce and swayed back and forth for hours while a windstorm raged.

Muir watched the junipers and dwarf pines at the summit, observed how “their stiff, crooked roots grip the storm-beaten ledges like eagles’ claws, while their lithe, cord-like branches bend round compliantly, offering but slight holds for winds, however violent.” Those little trees, able to mix Ben Franklin’s self-reliant tenacity and Taoism’s flowing harmony without a thought, while we wrinkle our brains every single day trying to figure out when to resist and when to let go….

Maybe I could claw my way into a ledge. But rock at the top of a tree? Never. “In its widest sweeps my tree-top described an arc of from twenty to thirty degrees,” Muir writes, “but I felt sure of its elastic temper.” Feeling safe in a way incomprehensible to me, he gave himself over to the excitement, taking the wind “into my pulses.” Often he closed his eyes and listened to the wind’s song, which is at its loveliest filtered through pine needles, or breathed the fragrance of all those resin-glazed branches brushing against one another. “I heard trees falling for hours at the rate of one every two or three minutes,” he reports. Yet when he finally climbed down, the light amber and the sun about to set, what struck him most was the fresh joy of the cleansed forest.

Muir found the sacred in that wild storm. And C.S. Lewis found God in a heavy breeze.

Walking with J.R.R. Tolkien along the River Cherwell, he announced, “Myths are lies breathed through silver.” Tolkien argued that Christianity was a “true myth,” the myth that “really happened.” As their words filled the night-soft air, a wind blew up, a rush of air that “came so suddenly on the still, warm evening and sent so many leaves pattering down that we thought it was raining,” as Lewis would later write. “We held our breath.”

The synchronicity was not lost on him. Here was Tolkien arguing for “divine mystery set loose in the world,” as my favorite theologian puts it, and up rises a sudden wind to echo his point. By 3 a.m., both men were weary but peaceful, and Lewis had been persuaded.

He was hardly the first. Wind has long suggested divine intervention, what with the gods blowing us about just for fun. If you are the punishing sort of god, you can use wind to deposit a plague of insects, or send a dry, searing wind to shrivel plants. If you are a gentler god, you can, as Yahweh does in Proverbs 30:4, gather the wind in the hollow of your hand. Or send it to hearten your disciples, grieving and adrift, huddled in an upstairs room.

Me, I yearn to be a whirling dervish, though I am not Sufi and this is a wild cultural misappropriation. That spinning, though, round and round in a grace-filled frenzy as first the grime of the world flies off you, and then your silly desires and doubts and worries. Soon not even your ego can stick. What ecstasy that would be.

My husband says no; you would only feel queasy and dizzy. But girls tend to twirl more than boys do—I read that someplace years ago. Now I can find nothing to support the claim, yet I still believe it. When did you last see two little boys hold hands so they could spin faster and faster? How often do male ballet dancers pirouette? This I do look up: roughly Female figure skaters also spin more frequently, with more revolutions per spin. They are changing the air itself, making wind.

As does sculptor Ned Kahn. He takes thousands of tiny discs or squares of aluminum and attaches them loosely to his sculptures, so they can each sway, shimmer, flutter, or ripple with the wind. For the 2000 World’s Fair, he created a tornado seven stories high and used fog—lit with changing colored lights—so we could watch it spiral.

NASA has its own, surprisingly poetic way of making wind visible, noting that “in the atmosphere, clouds can act like fingerprints for the movement of air.” Seen from above: a swirl of clouds, as the rushing air is split by volcano peaks and forms a downward eddy.

Who has seen the wind? We all have.

Capture of the Tripoli by the Enterprise, 1806-12, by Thomas Birch, Art Institute of Chicago (rawpixel)

“The leaves of trees fold before the eye. After minutes of a heavy and suffocating calm, succeeded squalls of stinging wind. The clouds of flying sand soon eclipsed the obscured disc of the sun.”

—from a letter quoted in Heaven’s Breath: A Natural History of the Wind

Goethe chose water to represent the human spirit, wind to represent our destiny. A destiny, then, of constant change—the very thing we struggle hardest to accept.

In The Wizard of Oz, wind transports Dorothy to a different world. Self-discovery, transformation, sure. But the novel is also widely interpreted as an allegory for the changes—populism, a resentment of elites, a quest for a new political order—that swept through the U.S. in the 1890s, a time nearly as gilded as our own. Gone With the Wind tells another story of upheaval, of a time that is ending, a place that will never be the same. Herman Wouk chose “the winds of war” to describe the unseen forces gathering, their dark energy building, before World War II.

Wouk found the perfect metaphor, because we already knew how the story played out. But what happens when we sense ominous forces we have no idea how to confront? That is when we come up with conspiracy theories, explanations we can cling to. Sometimes our theories happen onto the truth. Most of the time, they have no more contact with reality than the ancient creation myths—the Mayan gods who mixed us up from maize dough, or the slain Norse giant whose blood became the oceans. The same impulse is at work: little humans casting about for a potent explanation of something so big or vague, it feels inexplicable. But while the creation myths had profound metaphorical meanings, recent conspiracy theories read more like supervillain comic books desperate for a scapegoat.

When the Sirroco sweeps dust, bits of rock, sand, or virus out of Africa and scatters it in southern Europe, this Saharan dust is often framed as an intrusion, just as migrants are. These accounts “arguably map onto the ‘fortressing’ effect of European immigration policies,” Lucy Sabin writes, “alongside dehumanizing descriptions of people migrating into Europe as ‘floods,’ ‘swarms,’ and ‘waves.’” A science paper analyzing the bacteria in the wind’s dust is titled “Legal immigrants: invasion of alien microbial communities during winter occurring desert dust storms.”

Wind is movement, you see. It breaks things up, cleans them off, demands change. Pope John XXIII used Vatican II to throw open a window, urging Catholics to let a fresh breeze into their tightly sealed churches. Not everyone was pleased. The winds of change, we sigh, and wait anxiously to see which way the wind blows.

Thanks to Edward Lorenz’s chaos theory, we now know that a change as sensitive as the flapping of tissue-thin butterfly wings can set off a chain reaction that will eventually cause a tornado. We know that burning fossil fuels is driving up global temperatures, so that hurricanes, droughts, wildfires, and floods are becoming more severe and more frequent. We know, in fact, so much that we have to pretend none of it is true. Wherever chaos exists, it must simply be forced back into order.

The winds are dying now, some say, calling the phenomenon “global stilling.” No, they are speeding up, say others, pointing to the powerful waves cresting high as the atmosphere heats. All of this is happening; it depends on where you look and when. The only possible generalization is that the wind’s cycles are variable, unstable, and unpredictable, and the rising waves are exposing us to extreme storms and coastal flooding. Can we harness some of this intensified wave energy? That would make us god-kings. But so far, our tech has not matched their power.

We do have wind energy, for hope—except that our president has a horror of what he calls “windmills.” “I never understood wind,” Trump once admitted. “You know, I know windmills very much. They’re noisy. They kill the birds. You want to see a bird graveyard?” Later, he announced that wind’s noise caused cancer. And that “the windmills are driving the whales crazy.”

Funny how, as storms grow more destructive and technology more powerful and uncontrollable, politics grows more tumultuous. Is there a connection, with the helpless fear or denial of the climate crisis enhancing the appeal of uber-confident authoritarian leaders? “Beware of spitting against the wind,” Nietzsche warned. Those who resist strong forces recklessly will pay a price.

I shake off these thoughts. Close your eyes, I tell myself. Breathe. And in the darkness, an image comes to me: Mr. Dick, the kindly, slightly off-kilter wise fool in David Copperfield. Unable to free his mind from the horror of King Charles I’s beheading, he finally writes the king’s name on the sails of his kite and lets the wind carry it. “There’s plenty of string,” he tells David, “and when it flies high, it takes the facts a long way.”

Our psyche needs the wind: not simply to blow away our messes, but to remind us that nothing stays put forever—not horror, not sorrow, not even political chaos. Only hope endures. And love. And the broken bits of human nature that keep compromising both.

Last spring, a few weeks before the tornado, I watched a little boy and his dad in Forest Park. The day was sunny and breezy, and they, too, had a kite—rainbow-bright, with streamers like Tibetan prayer flags. Pure joy. No corpse’s name written on those sails. They waited and waited, and then the dad called, “Now!” and the boy ran hard and we all hoped hard—because you just never know what the wind will do. But yes! The kite was borne aloft, and for a minute, it soared.

Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.