The Way of the Wind

A modern-day tumbleweed in this world of litter, a crumpled white ball rolled up next to my foot. The wind was stronger today than usual for this time of year.  Reluctantly, I picked it up. Stiff, my arthritic fingers hurt all the way down to gnarled bones under bulging veins. The skin on them like plastic wrap covering blue lines. I was told yesterday that I don’t look my age. I don’t think he saw my hands. They look twenty years older than my face. For that matter, he must have overlooked the Elvira streak in my hair.  Elvira—I feel so old that I’m not even sure how many people would even understand that reference. I kind of like the streak, though. I don’t like my stiff, aching hands. 

I had intended to throw the tumbleweed away. Litter depresses me. But, looking at the crumpled paper, I caught sight of handwriting between the folds. The swirls and loops clearly written by young, healthy hands. Had the same hands created the pressure that collapsed the paper and buried the words? Had the same hands tossed this ball on the ground to tumble towards my feet in the wind?

Opening the paper, unfolding and flattening it against my coat, made me feel guilty. I knew I had no cause for shame. The young hands had thrown these words into the wind for the world to find. Surely, all expectation of privacy was erased by littering. Litterbugs didn’t deserve respect, anyway, I told myself. 

Young, careless hands had forced the paper into a ball and tossed it in the wind. Young, healthy hands had written a list. Young, hopeful hands had written a list of dreams. It wasn’t a bucket list made by someone old enough to realize how short a life really is. It was the kind of list you write when you think you have a lifetime full of options ahead of you. When I was young, I was going to be a writer, an artist, a designer, and so much more. I was a dreamer with young, healthy hands who never imagined it would one day hurt to write more than a page of script.  Opening the list, my hands weren’t the only thing that hurt. My soul throbbed. Unrealized potential twisted and gnarled too, like scar tissue, squeezed my chest tightly as I started to read the hopes and dreams someone had thrown away.

There wasn’t anything remarkable about the list. The litterbug wasn’t hoping to be an astronaut or to win a Nobel prize for ending poverty. They dreamed of having a family and a home; and of writing something someone would enjoy reading, perhaps a song. Playing a musical instrument made the list. Traveling both domestically and abroad didn’t seem too grandiose a goal. 

This list could easily have been written by me. 

The wind grew stronger. I folded the list and put it and my hands deep in the refuge of coat pockets, turning my feet towards home. I couldn’t help but think about my own dreams. I didn’t wad them up or throw them away, but they had gone the way of the wind all the same.   

I thought of the winds of Chicago, where I had lived for a short while in my twenties with my first husband. My first attempt at the dream of a family blown away in the Windy City. Then there were the fragrant, warm breezes of early summer in the South, remembered from my childhood and sought again when I retreated there after Chicago. Those light, soothing breezes soon stilled in the blistering heat, and I grew restless again. Was I pushed along in life like a tumbleweed from place to place, a crumpled ball of dreams myself? Was I blown from place to place by the storms of crisis? Or did I chase the wind? I might not have intentionally thrown my dreams away, but I threw everything else out before risking it all again in DC a couple of years later. 

This time, I was working on the dream of finding a fulfilling career. It almost worked. For a while, it looked like I might live up to my potential. But the storms in my head never let me settle. Less than two years later, everything I owned fit into a few suitcases again and I rode the wind all the way to Germany, checking the dream of traveling off my list. This was also the start of my next attempt at having a family. And, while I stayed put physically more than ever before, emotionally the next decade and a half was spent preparing for, enduring, and rebuilding after the hurricanes that come when living with an alcoholic.  

Not long ago, I found freedom. Still, it’s hard to stop the habit of boarding up my soul to withstand coming winds. The winds are calmer now, but the years are gone. I think of all the seasons that passed and how few are left for me now.  How many more springs carrying the scent of daffodils through the air do I have left? When I look at my hands, I mourn youth.  It isn’t vanity. At least, I don’t think it is.  I am sad seeing myself old--less because I want to think myself beautiful than it’s a reminder of how little time there is left to find happiness, to fulfill dreams.  A mirror records time in ways our brain would otherwise forget. A reflection is a reminder that time is running out.

Reaching home, I retreated from the wind, literally this time. I put the wrinkled paper on the table and decided to write a new list of my own. Instead of dreams to fill a future, I wanted to look back and acknowledge all I’d achieved. I had studied and traveled. I learned a second language. I had a child--more family than a husband could ever be. I fought for myself and won. I never gave up on myself, when so many others did. I wrote stories my daughter loved to hear. I collected lasting connections from all stages of my life and corners of the world. 

As you get older, memories replace dreams. I looked down at my hands. Warmer now, they didn’t hurt as much. Their age was no longer a reminder of unrealized potential. Rather, these were the hands of someone who had lived. Older, wiser hands took the list sent by the wind and crumpled it again.  Older, experienced hands threw away someone else’s unwanted dreams.  Older, warmer hands wrote something for the first time in a long time today.