Winds of Change

“Fear has a large shadow, but he himself is small.”
-Ruth Gendler

I am petrified of storms. When it is windy I cringe, terrified that the roof will blow off and everything I care about will be flung into the pit of the night sky. At my worst times I worried even when there was no wind- I considered that it might start without notice.
It has always been that way. At blustery times I slept as a child with my fingers burrowed into my ears and stayed that way until morning when the gales had hushed and the world was safe again.
When evening would fall and winds began to gather, my heart would tumble to my toes. I relentlessly asked Mater if she thought the wind was bad, if it would get worse, and if we would be all right.
The appropriate answers were no, no and yes, of course.
That was not adequate for me. I had to have a gauge of some sort, and I found one quite early on.
We had a metal dustbin in our back yard and I used that as an instrument of measurement: if it gave the slightest rattle I would panic.
"Do you think the wind will blow off the lid of the dustbin?" I asked time and again of my mother all the way through my childhood.
The dustbin was located near to my bedroom window and I would lie awake ready to block my ears if I thought that the lid was close to taking off.
I never gave much thought to what would happen if the wind did raise the dustbin lid. Beyond thoughts of our roof tiles scattering and all inside being tossed, I attempted to block my mind as well as my ears of such notions.
Then on Christmas Eve when I was seventeen, we had a storm so violent that some parts of our roof were indeed launched into the air. Our chimney toppled. Live electrical wires danced on the roadside. Our battery-operated radio told us that somebody had been killed by a wall that collapsed. Our dustbin lid was not only prised off but it vanished entirely, sucked into the darkness.
I did not put my fingers in my ears at all on that seemingly ceaseless night. I was almost eerily calm, quite resigned to the fact that we were in the midst of the very thing I had always been most afraid of. The thick walls of the house were trembling and the wailing was deeply unsettling.
It was actually happening. The best thing, the only thing to do about it was to sit and talk with one another and hope that the storm would wear itself out with the hours.
It did, of course, and a still morning undid the fear and the darkness.
Mater hunted for as long as she considered worthwhile but that dustbin lid had taken its opportunity and fled the scene. It was gone. It did not entirely take with it as luggage my irrational fear of disaster but I remember that night and the dreadful things that were unfolding all about us. I remember and realise that the morning did arrive, as expected, and the wind beat itself up and then left us to resume our lives. We survived.
My brother's significant other was wandering in my mother's back fields yesterday when she struck gold. She imagined for a moment that she had discovered buried treasure. She strode back to the house feeling rather like a pirate and said to my mother, "did you know you have a dustbin lid buried in your field?"
To her astonishment my mother started laughing, for of course she was thinking of me, and of how my wind gauge had long ago blown away as I had feared it would. Life goes on; the vessel that it covered has long been consigned to the past, and Mater can only hear the faintest childish echo of a voice from yesterday: "do you think the wind will blow off the lid of the dustbin?"