Stillness

The wind was funnelling out of the north yesterday morning, the first full day of the new season, and it was cold enough, minus 6 or 7, to bring a significant chill. It blew all through the day, keeping the harbour a deep blue, marked with whitecaps. I don't mind wind per se -- it can bring a clean freshness as it blows through our days and it does dry the clothes on the line -- but there is something to be said for stillness.

When we lived in Maitland, in a tall house on a small knoll at the mouth of the Shubenacadie River (now home to a rafting company), the wind could buffet us from pretty well every direction, and much of the time it did. During a storm in our first winter when I walked around the corner of the house with a pot of boiling water (it was a frozen pipe at the wellhead problem), the bitter norwester scooped the contents of the pot in one fierce gust and glazed the front of my coat with instant ice. I resolved the issue by taking a kettle instead, but the presence of wind was an almost constant factor in our lives there, consistently making you tire more quickly as it roared past your ears when you were working outside. So we built fences to protect the gardens and found places to be that were in the lee. And we learned to value stillness, the quiet evenings when voices could be heard from way down the beach or across the salt marsh and the air lay still around us. There was always a relief and a gentle peace in it.

This morning the air is still. White plumes of steam curl straight up from the refinery stacks over by Eastern Passage. One gull flies across my view, then a crow, no gliding on the wind today, but a steady flapping to pull them through this air. The harbour is a pale calm mirror reflecting the morning sky, a dark patch breaking the surface from a small shoal of fish moving. Outside the kitchen window the trees are still, not a twig or needle even shivers in this morning air, and the only movement is the quick flick of the tiny woodpecker at the suet cage.

The sun will move up in the sky. Shifts in temperature will get the air moving through the day, a light souwester will likely darken the water as it gusts across the harbour, and clouds will come. Until then the morning is a still place to start this day. It may not stay that way -- it never does because the weather always moves here -- but right now it is a peace to cherish.