Eastward Blows The Wind

I work east of where I live.

My every movement to work is to the east - each road, all the motorways, the train line, even the walk to the station. It’s that way all the way into the rising sun.

It’s the opposite on the way home, or course, and being westward, its into the sun again.

But the wind? The wind has different ideas. The wind wants to blow east. It moves in from the west. If you want to go back further, it starts in Mexico. Maybe it braces itself with a couple of margueritas before heading up over Cuba and the Florida Keys, brushing past the Carolinas, perhaps picking up rain over the Mason Dixon line for Pennsylvania and New York before heading out over the ocean through jet engines, speeding up their eastward journey before coming ashore at some British port that was busier in the days before the turbines first roared.

It spreads and tempers through England’s hills and bricks and eventually blows east down my street in the morning, where I have the nerve to feel tired and sometimes alone.

Eastward blows the wind.

It blows away from the sun in the evening. It’s on my back in the morning, pushing me to work and it challenges me on my way home to empty plates and full hearts and heads ready for bedtime stories.

Santa Ana, mistral, sirocco, zonda, gulf stream. Every population has a name for the wind it knows.

Eastward is why the west of London is the fancy part, and the smokey factories and soot settled in the east, the trade at the mouth of the muddy Thames.

Out where I live and upwind, the river’s a different story, rolling through valleys and and under the breeze carrying newsreader accents echoing around big waterfront properties. Teas. “E”s pronounced like the letter sounds and sounds of the wind itself.

The wind blows because it is all it is capable of doing.