wind advisory

Click on the cartoon, above, from Jack “the Stargazer” Horkheimer to read the apparent origin of the old saying “in like a lion, out like a lamb” referring to the month of March. I find the story especially compelling since I am a Leo lion married to an Aries lamb.

Monday I’m not sure if March went “out like a lamb.” It did get warmer here in Michigan. But the wind kicked up, and we had a thunderstorm, both things I love, most of the time.

When I was a girl, we used to sit on our big front porch while thunderstorms pelted the ground, lit up the sky and filled the drain gutters to overflowing in our small town. We loved it.

In the middle of a windstorm at the lake I remember watching from the cottage down the hill while one of my sisters sat perched at the end of the dock, wrapped in a thick blanket, staring at white capped waves blowing across the water, her hair snapping like a flame.

In an airplane in 1975, I didn’t love high winds when returning from an eight week study abroad program in Europe, into the little Lansing airport. The winds were so gusty that our pilot, just before landing, suddenly torqued up our engines and soared back into the clouds for a different approach, into the wind. My parents were on the ground watching our wing tips dip side to side, almost scraping the tarmac.

Another time I didn’t like high winds was in ’79 when Don and I drove into southern California on one of our twenty-something adventures at midnight ready to pitch a tent in the KOA campground in the middle of a Santa Ana (pronounced “Santana”) windstorm. We managed to pound the tent stakes into the cement-like ground, but the wind flapped our tent so violently we couldn’t sleep, even though we had been driving west through and from Texas all day and were exhausted. We tried sleeping in our sleeping bags sitting in the front seats of our little Dodge Horizon. No good either. Then we drove another hour to Ginnie’s house (they weren’t home) in Pasadena and pitched our tent in their back yard (no doubt giving the neighbors pause).

I don’t like driving my tiny Chevy Aveo in high winds because it isn’t heavy enough on the road and gets blown around while I hold the steering wheel tight. Remember the Yugo that got blown off the Mackinac Bridge?

In 1989, a tragic accident captured the front pages of state newspapers. Leslie Pluhar's 1987 Yugo, a small car, plunged from the bridge more than 150 feet to the straits below. It was the first vehicle to fall off the five-mile span since it opened. Gale force winds blowing from the northwest helped lift her car off the roadway and over the side. In 1990, a Senate committee recommended replacing the bridge's 36-inch high outer railing with a 48-inch railing that curves inward toward the bridge deck.

Let me tell you, I thought about that incident when I drove across the same bridge last October.

But when I’m at home in my warm house, in jammies reading the latest New Yorker or The Sun, I love to hear a wind storm howl outside. That erratic tap tap tap of branches on the window and an occasional look out at the tilting trees, flexible and strong, is reassuring, even though I know most likely there will be branches torn and grounded by next morning.



This photo of our corn crib shows seeds blowing last May - not snow