Deep rumbling noises culminating in howling and rattling woke me up this morning. I was confused, because it sounded like the throaty growl of earthquakes past, but there was no movement of the walls, just a sense of everything outside the house spinning in loud commotion. Turns out the Santa Ana Winds peaked early this morning.

Mr. W came back into the house at 7am cursing. Mondays are trash collection days, but the winds have beaten the City to the collecting; large bins in front of each house are blown over, some bins thrown down the street, trash strewn everywhere. Our magnolia tree in the front yard painstakingly picked out at a local nursery the first week we moved in and planted and babied was lying on its side, as with my poor abused avocado tree, still in its plastic pot. The avocado is now just inside the front door, but Mr. W has gone to buy stakes to replant the magnolia and give it enough support so that it’d hopefully survive the fall. Other saplings in our backyard blew over, and all young trees still standing have this sideways slant although surprisingly the roses still top our rose bushes beaming a bright white in the sun. The sun’s another weird character in all this. It shone optimistically and innocently the entire time, so that if you go out to curse the weather, it looked at you like, “What?”

Mr. W ran into a neighbor outside this morning, who was also running around trying to retrieve their trash cans, Halloween decorations, patio furniture. “Does this happen often?” Mr. W asked her.
“Yeah, at least twice a year. Didn’t they tell you that?”
“No…they omitted that fact about this place,” Mr. W, the man from the Windy City of Chicago, sighed.

If Christopher Columbus had enjoyed these winds 516 years ago to the day (did I do my math right?), the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria would’ve sailed to land in a week.