It gets real windy in Ohio. Like an invisible ocean sweeping above my head. I hear it while I'm lying in the loft. The wooden boards below the straw creak in protest, pleading with the wind to cease its manipulation. Sometimes I fear the roof to be ripped from the walls; the only thing separating me from that ocean. I toss in the hay, visions of a giant pencil in the sky sketching the lines of turbulence. A crack, and the wind sends a tree branch cascading to the Earth, the sound finally muffled by the wood's blanketing leaves. My eyes flicker open at the din. It's official: I can't sleep through windstorms.
If you ever wind up gravitating toward a valley in your life, remember: if you can't convince them, confuse them. Fairhaven honed my perception of the valley, and it confused the shit out of me. Once you stop resisting the reality of it, you experience the shit you would normally overhear in a smokey bar in Queens. Shit like... an old man as a child, taking his younger brother down to the fish market, but being too poor to pick up dinner. They've survived this long, though. How? There must be some method to the daily scrounge which has become their entire futility. One of the grubby kids clears his throat, yells a few choice curse words up at the fishmonger, and is rewarded with a grin and a codfish hurled down at him from the boat. Brilliant. Insult the sailors in the right way and you have a free meal. I muse this glory of culture shock as it enters my ears. "I'll have to remember that one".
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