Continental winds

Today the wind is blowing a cold winter gale.

It's mid-June.

A strange experience all around to this northern-hemisphere American living Down Under.

The miniature red and white windmill in my one-acre yard swings back and forth like an uncontrollable kite on a string at the beach.

Our Galah parrot, Buster, is content is his outside cage which is bolted to the verandah, and chirps and cheeps and squawks along with the other cockatoos and magpies and rosella parrots enjoying the gale around him.

I love the sound of the wind funneling down our woodstove pipe and whipping around the corners of our house in the Australian Bush.

The wind sings here. It's different than what I've been used to for 40-plus years. The wind has a voice. It's difficult to explain, even for me. It's something one has to hear on their own.

In Battle Ground USA at my old house, the wind whispered and sighed through the branches of dense fir trees. But if the wind came down the chimney we all stopped and listened...it was not common. Here it is normal, and actually as I write at this moment and hear this other-worldly sound, it gives a comfortable, homey feeling. It's low and hollow like an oboe.

I have a memory that once during a really bad storm at our haven in Battle Ground I was upstairs cleaning and my youngest, Kimberly Mae, was sitting on the window seat in the front room downstairs watching the tall fir trees sway around the house. She was probably eight years old. Suddenly I heard her scream, and the hair on my neck stood straight up as I raced down the stairs to see if she was alive.

A neighbor's shallow-rooted Douglas fir tree had toppled toward our house where she sat, immovable with terror. But the top of the 40-foot tree only glanced off our roof, damaged the gutter and bounced into the front yard. Other than the gutter, the house was hardly damaged, and tree remains were cut for firewood.

But here in Scarsdale, Victoria, the wind whistles and whines and sings (really sings) through sparse gum tree leaves and screens on windows and doors in homes far apart from each other. Trees falling onto homes is rare. I can stand outside in the middle of our acre and hear the wind sing through everyone else's trees and homes and sheds. I smile. I want to open my arms and embrace the wind, but I think that I'm already considered the nutty American.

That's what happens when you live in a very SMALL neighborhood and town of about 50 people, not including horses, sheep and cows.

Anyway, the trees here are so drought-starved, the roots go very deep; not like water-laden, shallow-rooted Douglas fir trees. It is rare that a whole gum tree topples here...which is good. These trees are huge and heavy.

The danger is when a one-ton drought-starved branch breaks off a trunk and lands in the road or on a car or on a person.

Steve calls it free firewood.

Life is certainly different here.

And today while I am stuck at home in a recliner with a computer, I rather like the sound of the wind in the chimney, the roar of a good fire, and the thought that before long my husband will be home.