Eshtine

thoughts of wind and trees

I storm-chased today. The first drops dotted the sidewalk as I left work but in the time it took to get to the car the rain became sharp pellets, each so sharp and heavy I yelled "Hail!" as I frantically rolled up windows. It wasn't hail. It was just body-smashing rain. I fled it down the highway and came to clear space where the only water was the spray bouncing out of the tire treads in front of me.
I had one short stop before home, and as the storm seemed to have just caught up with me when I was going back to the car (furious wind, thick searing currents of lightning), I thought perhaps I'd beat it and get to watch it wash through again from the calm zone of my front porch. But it must have veered west, not south. Thunder muttered in the distance but the rain I watched from my house drifted down lazy as snow. The wind made the maple's leaves flash white but it didn't gust and thrash the branches as I'd hoped.
They say weather's a chaotic thing. We can predict it now with a fair amount of accuracy over the short term, but when we look past the next few days, too many variables get involved. Blink your eyes and that's a new air current triggering who knows what as it moves across miles. I'm thinking of this as I watch the trees heave and the listen to the leaves as the rain drums on them and they clap against each other. I'm thinking, too, of the near-chaos of trees--it again is relatively easy to predict how they'll grow when they're small (they'll grow up), but no one I've heard of has ever looked at a maple key and mapped out all its future branches.
I'm thinking this because I'm wondering if trees think. I'm wondering if the sounds the leaves make in the wind are language, or better still, art. The answer I was told long ago was no--the trees move how they move because the wind is hitting them in a particular way. If they were sentient, or more precisely, if they had free will, we might occasionally see them resist the wind or rock back and forth on a calm day.
But what if--what if they were partly shaped by destiny and partly shaped by their own decisions? And what if the wind, too, began in a certain direction but made tiny choices, and that was why over time it escapes our predictions?
There are things in me which I could not control--my color and shape at birth, the family I was born in--just like a maple will have gray bark with black scars and thin, sharp-fingered leaves. But is it ever told how many branches to have, where every leaf should sprout?
If it decides these things, and the wind chooses a portion of its force and direction, maybe they have helped determine how what they will create today looks and sounds. I get to watch and listen to this, both their dance and their percussive symphony.