silence

Silence held her.  There was nothing to hear but the sound of the wind hushing the world.  She watched the slender grasses bow and rise in prayer to an insensible god as the wind ripped over them.  She watched the birds dart low and fast between boulders and twisted witch like junipers.  And she watched the rattling the sagebrush.  

She smiled unrolling the sleeves of her flannel shirt pulling them down tucking her hand inside the unbuttoned cuffs then shoved them inside the front pockets of her battered jeans. 

The wind had started as it always does announcing the pending sunset.  It whispers, Get your shit together now or stumble in the dark later.  Darkness is the most unforgiving noise the desert offers.  Unlike the sun, which can be tricked, Dark is absolute.  

The first tides of the wind had blown hot like the ground.  Slowly as the sun dipped over the horizon the pink decent swallowing all the other colors of the October desert the wind grew cool as shadow.

It raged in sets of breaking waves.  Caught in the middle, cold in its clutches she would shiver but then it would settle and the heat from the sand beneath her feet would rise flooding her whole body with the memory of that day’s long hot sun.  It was like a rollercoaster up and down.  

When the wind started to really bite and the ride no longer fun, she picked her path back zigzagging around the desert fauna and half hidden sandy burrows.  She had eaten dinner in the last sticky rays of the sunset, made herself a bed in the back of her truck and gathered fire wood in the late afternoon glare, had walked miles in the day’s heat, read by hazy morning light. Now there was nothing left to do but sleep under the coldness of far away stars and listen to the wind creep off into the night.  If it wasn’t for the silence of this place she was sure she would go mad.        

~mlb 3/7/13