Banshee is a Verb
When the world feels impossibly unstable the wind reminds us that everything passes.
The wind over the last couple of weeks has been insufferable. Battering the house from all sides, howling like a specter emerging from a deep cave in a rage, filling the world with its universal language of loss and longing.
Ginger, the dog, lifts her head and glares at me every time the windows rattle in their 100-year-old casings while the seventy-foot-tall spruce outside the bedroom stands her ground despite the sustained assault of fifty- and sixty-mile-an-hour winds. An icy draft seeps out of the closet and dances across my face and my cold, page-turning arm as I read in bed beneath a pile of blankets, reading the same sentence fifty times, my mind unable to hold onto it.
It’s made me feel unhinged, yet somehow hopeful.
“Wind” is an insufficient word on nights when it comes from all directions at once. Emptiness is a better word. Emptiness makes the spruce cry as she tries and fails to hold onto her cones and thankfully succeeds at maintaining her grip on the Earth. Emptiness plays the ancient windows like an instrument and rushes through small canyons between buildings, catching on shutters, gates, fences, chimneys, shingles, sounding notes along every crevice and edge—a midnight symphony that stirs up troubled dreams, ushers in dark thoughts.
When I was a small child growing up on the south shore of Massachusetts, the wind thrilled me, even when it was scary. The sound and energy of it felt like the Wizard of Oz. I hoped it might sweep me up and drop me down in a magical land where nothing and everything made sense. But as I grew older, I recognized a darkness I didn’t comprehend when I was little.
The wind begs me for answers that I don’t have to so many questions I wish I didn’t.
Am I a failure because I didn’t finish my degree? Am I unworthy of a loving partnership because I failed at marriage twice? Is becoming a nun my only viable retirement option? Why can’t you let go of your hateful thoughts about [redacted]? Don’t you know you were always the problem?
When the wind banshees like this in the middle of the night, that ever-present critical voice in my head shows up to lecture. You’re unfocused and lazy. You constantly start new things and never finish. You’re a lonely, unlovable, antisocial hermit. You don’t know how to think logically and have nothing of concrete value to offer the world.
Who do you even think you are?
Maybe my stinking thinking arises when the wind is up because the air is full of the suffering it collects as it races across the planet. It surrounds me, and like a tuning fork, I resonate with the vibration of pain. I am looking for another tone to awaken, a softer, loving vibration.
When I was a small child growing up on the south shore of Massachusetts, the wind thrilled me, even when it was scary. The sound and energy of it felt like the Wizard of Oz. I hoped it might sweep me up and drop me down in a magical land where nothing and everything made sense. But as I grew older, I recognized a darkness I didn’t comprehend when I was little.
On January 20 and 21, 1978, a blizzard hit New England and dumped 2-4 feet of snow across the region in one day. The wind was opaque white and moving in all directions. I watched from my bedroom window as it obliterated the view of the fallow alfalfa field and the woods beyond where I played all summer. It turned our empty above-ground pool and swingset into a humpback whale beached in the yard. It whistled in the attic eaves and made the lights flicker for hours until they blinked out and stayed out for more than a week.
Once it was over, we couldn’t open the back door because the snow drifted higher than the top of its frame. Twenty-nine people died in that storm, but also, my cousin was born in an ambulance at the height of the madness. My father got stranded at his job for days, and mom planted my sister and me on kitchen chairs in front of the gas range with our feet propped on the open door while we waited to be allowed to bundle up in snowsuits and get out there to play in it. We sipped mugs of hot cocoa with marshmallow fluff melting on the milky surface, our ears ringing with the sparkling silence of the departed storm.
That absence of sound after a winter storm is a silence unlike any other. I feel this silence in moments of meditation, the space between breaths.
In September of 1985, category 1 Hurricane Gloria roared across New England, doing tremendous damage, including dropping the last of the ancient Elms in our yard onto the corner of our roof and knocking down the chimney. Worried about that possibility, we had stayed at the big, drafty, century farmhouse in Kingston, Massachusetts, where my stepfather’s elderly mother lived alone.
After the eye passed over us and we re-entered the eyewall, a new sound filled the world—a living thing; screaming, crying, singing, howling, wailing, lamenting, begging, accusing. I curled up on an uncomfortable couch and scratched bad poems into a journal with a Bic pen by candlelight, trying to find the words for an existential longing that I still can’t name.
I have been that wind, only silently, contained, performing life while the storm raged inside of me.
In 1993, my first husband and I moved with our two-year-old son from a brownstone garden apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, into a passive solar home on fifty acres in Peterborough, New Hampshire. We arrived on October 31 and unpacked the moving truck while snow squalled and dusted the entryway floor. It would turn out to be the snowiest winter the region had experienced in more than a decade.
The wind sounds very different on the edge of a forest. The noise, punctuated with moments of silence, and the deep cold of that winter seeped into my soul and I got sick with pneumonia that lasted for nearly two months. I spent many nights bundled up on the couch in front of the wood stove, attempting to sleep, getting up often to stoke the fire so we wouldn’t freeze. I can smell the thyme oil I rubbed on the bottoms of my feet before stuffing them into woolen socks, and the fumes rising off the thick mustard plaster on my chest under a flannel compress with a hot water bottle on top of it—folk remedies a visiting homeopathic nurse suggested that helped my symptoms at least in the moment.
I often refer to that half year as my Shining, as in The Shining. I’m sure the wind collected mountains of regret as it passed over our struggling young marriage again, and again, and again. I shudder to think of that energy carried around the world.
The wind howled, and the snow piled up day and night. I clutched the hot water bottle with exhausted arms, coughing as if I might turn inside out. Our toddler seemed unbothered by any of it, requiring meals, stories, baths, hugs, snacks, and hours building fortresses with colorful wooden blocks, and making animals out of homemade salt dough tinted green, blue, yellow, and pink.
Meanwhile, his father grew more miserable in the job that moved us there in the first place. His mood deteriorated by the day until we both felt trapped. He, by the job. Me, by his unhappiness.
Each day over those months, we watched the massive granite boulder that we all joyfully climbed the week we arrived disappear from the middle of the ten-acre meadow on the east side of the house. Only the boulder’s tip sat atop a vast ocean of snow by spring. We could barely even see it over the drifts piled in front of our windows—eleven feet had fallen and stayed over the darkest months.
I often refer to that half year as my Shining, as in The Shining. I’m sure the wind collected mountains of regret as it passed over our struggling young marriage again, and again, and again. I shudder to think of that energy carried around the world. I wish we knew how to be in a healthy relationship so the wind could have carried our love instead.
It never stopped snowing and blowing for more than a day or two until mid-April, when we were frantically planning our late-May return to New York where we would not have to be so alone with each other, our dark thoughts, and the wind.
What a deep, challenging mud season.
Maybe it’s middle age, but everything feels brined in hidden meaning now, soaking the flesh of experience with salty possibility, savory hope, and tangy regret. Now the wind makes me reflexively clench the small deep muscles in my body as if I am bracing for a hit even while safe inside my little home here in Northeast, Ohio. I notice I’ve been holding my breath a lot more and leaning on my practices to soften, release, and let go. So much to let go of, maybe the wind will take it. But I think it’s up to me to transmute it.
Now I hear in the wind the terrifying story of our changing planet and the Earth’s outrage at our collective denial of our true nature, our divine connection to the planet and one another. The horror of war. The dehumanization of people. Division, cruelty, and greed. So much grief and fear.
And love.
I am determined to hear the love. I hope we all can.
Postscript: Last night before I went to bed I watched an episode of Northern Exposure—oh, how I love this beautiful show! It just so happened to be the “Ill Wind” episode (S4, E16). It’s winter and the community is under the spell of the Coho wind, similar to the Chinook wind in Colorado - a warm, powerful, rapid, snow-melting wind that is said to make people behave irrationally, even violently. During the episode, Chris reads to the town over the radio from a book about the many kinds of winds around the world that affect psyches. He mentioned the Front Range of Colorado’s Chinook Wind and I remembered that I wrote a poem called Chinook Wind a few years ago. It’s not very good, but maybe I’ll give it some attention and see if I can improve it enough to post to my poems page.
Here’s an interesting piece about how the wind makes us crazy on LitHub by Lyall Watson from his book Heaven’s Breath: A Natural History of the Wind.
I have now read Banshee three times, searching cautiously through the not-silent containment reaching toward glimmers of the storm raging within. Each read begs me for answers that I do not have, to questions that I wish I did not have. Keep hold the distinction of “asocial” from “antisocial”, as solitude is an honorable moral choice, with or without retirement to a convent. I will likely read Banshee again, entranced by meticulous phrases brined in meaning, soaked with salty possibility, savory hope, and tangy regret, but trying to keep a respectful space. It seems a hard choice to uncontain even flashes of the storm to the perceptions of others. I had not before thought how hard it may be for a writer to no longer be silent.
What a beautifully written piece, Kelly!