Thursday, December 9
Tumbleweeds
The wind came up today, just about 1 p.m., one of those atmospheric changes that forces the National Weather Service to issue high wind warnings and wind advisories and so on. The mountains are getting snow, three to eight inches they say, and we're getting wind.
I happened to be in the fourth floor break room at work when it came up, eating a burrito, reading Updike, the windows rattling, the sticks of winter trees bending and dancing, the evergreen shaking shaking shaking like a Polaroid picture. And then here came the army of tumbleweeds, flushed out of Montana and Wyoming, rolling, marching, cart-wheeling, plucky, spunky, heading southeast, always southeast. Across the field. Across the highway, past the open end of our three building horseshoe-shaped campus, on southeast. There's so many of them, all rolling in parallel paths, southeast. It looks funny, all of them bouncing southeast. A migration. A herd. A tumult of tumbleweeds? Serious. Resolute. Determined. So are these tumbleweeds.
Where do they go? And what do they do when they get there? Is there a huge pile of tumbleweeds in Oklahoma, tucked up against some chain link fence along I-40? Do they roll all the way across Texas, sun themselves on the beaches of the Gulf of Mexico? Are they going for a swim in the Gulf of Mexico?
