Wind in the Barberry

   As  I drove past the house on the curve yesterday, where we once lived,  the wind was blowing and it triggered a memory, stored away for so many years:  It was a windy day, a rather chilly one,  and I was outside by myself.  That alone would have been unusual. The three of us, when Dorothy was old enough, were always outside together.  But that day for some reason, the others had gone inside, leaving me alone in the great outdoors.  I remember feeling a kind of freedom, and power, though I could not have been more than four years old.
     The three of us may have been in that particular  area, one somewhat closer to the road than where we usually played, and I can't recall what we were doing before the others went inside. A vivid memory, almost like a photograph,  takes me  to a somewhat bedraggled row of barberry bushes alongside the road at the end of our property.  The air is cold, the wind is blowing, and I am  a solitary figure, running back and forth through the barberries, with the brambles tearing at my clothes.  But I don't mind:  I feel strong and exhilarated, though I wouldn't have been able to describe it that way back then.  I think I must have felt that each time I made it through the thicket, I was accomplishing something on my own, doing something no one else had ever done or would ever know about.
    Even to this day, there is something about wind that is a a little bit thrilling, and ominous in its potential.  Eerie, in fact.