Headwind

• A personal meditation on why strong wind always manages to get under my skin.

In the morning, my wife and I sit on the terrace, drinking coffee, eating biscuits. The dogs are stretched out in the grass. That’s just how things are with us. The sun is shining, warming the skin, sinking all the way into the bones. Tuning our joints after a long winter that, with every passing year, feels harder and harder to bear.

We look out into the garden and think about what to do with the spring that’s just beginning—what might be possible to get done over the course of the year.

A perfect morning, you’d think—if it weren’t for the wind. It was supposed to blow hard all day, from morning till night, and when your house sits on the edge of a village, surrounded by open fields, the wind really goes for it.

I complain that the wind is seriously annoying. My wife agrees, but doesn’t dwell on it. Honestly, she’s less affected by the weather than I am—prolonged bad weather always pushes me into a low mood first. Rain can be fine when it waters the garden and tops up the rain tank, but it can’t rain nonstop for days. And worst of all, for me, is the wind.

I complain again. That’s just how I am—I can be irritable when the world doesn’t behave the way I imagine it should. Meanwhile, my wife disappears into the house to change into work clothes, planning to do something in the garden despite the wind—maybe replant the strawberries, maybe come up with something new. That’s just how she is.<>

I remain on the terrace with the dogs, wanting to enjoy the sight of the lawn I mowed yesterday. It was quite a job, and freshly cut grass is always a pleasure to look at.

Except there’s the wind.

That damn wind, gusting harder and harder.

I sit in the chair, the house at my back, the wind pressing into me from the side.

I close my eyes and focus on its intensity, because when something irritates me, I tend to give it even more attention, in a kind of self-punishing way. If you’re already tearing off a scab, you might as well dig a sharp fingernail into the exposed wound—that’s my style.

A moment later, a thought forms in my head—what is it about this wind that bothers me so much?

That it keeps battering me like this? Like a tireless bully who refuses to give it a rest?

Or that it keeps pushing against me, slowing me down?

And then it comes—a memory from early childhood.

I’m six, maybe seven. Sitting on my first proper bicycle, happy that I can already ride it fairly well. I’m with older boys—I was always around older kids, mostly thanks to my brother, who’s six years older than me. At a certain point, I must have felt like a ball chained to his leg. I know I can’t really measure myself against the older boys in many ways—they can easily leave me behind on their bikes whenever they feel like it—so I try not to annoy them too much, not to give them a reason to leave me eating dust.

We loiter on my home street, the boys discussing where to ride. I don’t care where, I just want to belong to the group.

The gang sets off, so I hop onto the saddle and push down on the pedal. But my bike doesn’t move an inch. I grip the handlebars tightly, push with my legs, but the bike stays put. I look back and see one of the boys holding onto my seat, refusing to let go. I push harder, wrench the bike, stomp on the pedals with everything I’ve got, but it still won’t move. I start to get angry, until tears well up. The boy finds it amusing, so he keeps holding the bike while I jerk the handlebars, wrench the whole thing, stand on both pedals, push with my legs, trying to tear myself loose. And then—then he finally lets go, and I fall. I fall onto the gravel, scrape my elbow and my knee, but worst of all, I scrape up my nice new bike.

That’s exactly what I remember when the wind presses into me on the terrace. It’s hard to say whether it really happened exactly like this—memories are tricky—but what I felt back then comes back now in the same form I felt it some thirty years ago. It sends a chill through me.

That feeling throws me into another memory. This time I’m ten—a regular school day in elementary school. I’m sitting at my desk, trying to be a “good kid,” an unobtrusive kid, the kind who doesn’t get in the way and is easy to overlook. Except some boys in the class have tied my chair to the desk with wire, and tied my backpack to it as well. I can’t pull the chair back, I can’t grab my bag. The lesson is ending, the other kids are packing up, getting out of their seats. I’d like to disappear too, but I can’t—I’m stuck on that wired chair, yanking my wired backpack. I start to rage, I start crying, keep pulling at the bag and the chair, and the boys find it hilarious.

And following that, I remember how for seven whole years I rode my bike to high school—because I didn’t want to obey a bus schedule or squeeze in among strangers. During those years, it sometimes rained, and I arrived at first class soaked through. Sometimes it froze hard, and to this day my skin dries out and cracks every winter because of it. And sometimes the wind blew hard. I still remember the grind of cycling to school at a snail’s pace, the wind hitting me from the side, leaning my bike just to keep from falling, and at some point wondering whether it wouldn’t be better to just get off and walk the rest of the way. Because with every push on the pedals, it felt like I was moving forward only a little, otherwise staying in place—no forward momentum at all.

I take the wind personally. As something that will eventually make my efforts in life look ridiculous. And yet it’s blowing everywhere, pushing against everyone and everything around. Bending trees, whipping up dust, wearing down the birds circling above the fields over there in the distance. A long-term, irritating, exhausting constant, digging into childhood wounds.

I would keep thinking about it, but my wife comes back just then, saying she needs help finding a bicycle pump because the wheel on the garden cart is completely flat. While I’m sitting here writing about some wind, she’s already started replanting the strawberries. I’m thinking, and she’s around the corner going at it with a shovel—that’s just how it sometimes is with us.

I stop writing and head up to the attic to look for the pump—the wind never really disappears, after all. My childhood is long gone, but the wind gets up from time to time. And sometimes it will blow straight against me. Hard. It depends on which direction I choose. Either way, the wind can’t be an excuse anymore, even if that would be more comfortable. And the pump isn’t going to find itself.