Miles Davis / In A Silent Way

Photo by Richard Yost/Editing by John Fraim

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John Fraim

The normal winters in Columbus, Ohio are usually tame creatures without much animation to them. Columbus is rated high on the chart of cloudy days a year. Meaning, days that have all the drama to them of “being cloudy.”

I’m a Californian and the cloudy days of Columbus are getting to me. And, getting to me more because Columbus is always so beautiful for its season of the year. 

We’d been living in a small village in Ohio about ten miles from the great outer belt that wrapped around the city. We were more of a recent development in Ohio and planned community more than other areas. In fact, the community was created by a well-known person.

This winter has been one of darkness and silence. Dark skies over the record snows in Ohio. All over NE part of the nation. I look for a time to get out and start walking again. Now, it’s touch and go with the weather. Luckily, no great damage from nature up here in Central Ohio. There are the usual river overflows. But it’s been a steady year compared to the weather tragedies in the other states.

* * *

I feel its effects of this weather in ways hard to express. It is simply the deadness of grey in Columbus. There is the fact Columbus is in the middle of much weather turbulence. Always changing. In fact, one of the things I love about Ohio is the summer storms. The great flashes of light and then the great boom.

But this winter in Ohio has been tough. The skies just hanging overhead. No animation. No life to these skies. Just quietly hanging overhead. 

Then, there was magic in the skies of our village today. A day that started out grey but turned brilliant blue in the afternoon, all clouds swept from it by the great winds. The winds started early in the day and by mid-day and all afternoon they were some of the highest winds ever recorded in Central Ohio. I went out to remove trash blown onto our yard, but it was hopeless. The winds had everything disrupted in out village. 

* * *

It’s a warm evening in Columbus and I sit out on our patio and watch the sun go down. The trees in the yard sway to the left like they are in a minor hurricane. I sit on the porch. Perhaps I’m being a little too brave I wonder? Yet it is so nice to see. The great winds sweeping through Ohio and – somehow – cleansing it of all the dark, cloudy days of cold winter. What an entrance for Spring! But in Ohio, you never knew. Although there were lots of people who told you they knew. 

Maybe we will have another great snow? Or some prolongation of winter? 

* * *

But today is special. The wind of today cannot be repeated. 

And, of course, there is grand symbolism to the word “wind.”

For me the symbolism is between the stillness of death and the windiness of life.

Perhaps I’ve lived in this stillness a little too long. 

And, perhaps welcome the windiness in my life … a little too much.

Yet here this day is. A gorgeous day of wind in central Ohio blowing the dark clouds out of the skies. As wind always does to anything that is stationary in the sky. The winds either move the clouds or blow them away altogether sometimes. 

* * *

The wind howls outside my office window. Looking out our front window, I can see more things blown over our front yard, but this is the way it is for everyone. There is little reward in trying to keep trash off the front yard during these great winds. 

It seems to me that wind is one of nature’s greatest methods of communication. 

For now, there is the emotional reaction of to the sky over Columbus that is clear and brilliant blue. Different from all those days of dark grey clouds. All the clouds of winter swished away. The whiteboard/ blackboard wiped clean and ready for a new year. A new cycle? A new period of life? For me? For others?

I’m sure grey skies will return over Ohio. Yet Ohio is a gorgeous state and no amount of bad weather can mask this fact. Maybe it can to others. Not Ohioans. A unique, windy day in March is a perfect example. A symbol of cleaning worthless concerns off the table and letting ones with weight and truth have precedence (be the last ones standing, after the others are blown away, with a reference to the symbol of wind again).

For once, the skies have life to them and this life sweeps away the greyness with a clear brilliant blue with no clouds in it. And there is that encompassing, spiritual feeling, that life is somehow starting over again. Not the experience for all. The experience of some though.