Cold Front

Cold fronts in New Home are something I had never experienced heretofore.

In Old Home, cold fronts were not so much events as they were seasonal.  Everyone knew that around the end of October it slowly grew colder until it was Winter.  Cold fronts were pretty much simply there - at least it felt cold - until March or so when Spring returned.

Here it is a completely  different experience.

Cold fronts come blowing in from the North as if driving by a supernatural fury.  The wind begins blowing until it is raging through the trees, around houses, and through every crack in a fence or gate it can find.  And the wind does not seem to let up:  it just blows and blows as it brings the cold air rushing through and around. 

Even as I write this morning the cold front - it was 80 F yesterday! - continues to blow as it has since I went to bed last night, almost 7 hours of constant wind moving past the windows and past the house.  It makes for a miserable night's sleep of course and woe betide you if you have failed to fully close a gate the night before; it creaks and shakes until, grumbling, someone gets up at 0300 to close it.

Interestingly enough the warm fronts do not arrive with the same sense of zest and power:  things simply begin warming up until all of a sudden it is hot.  It is only the cold fronts that spit their power and rage in the form of wind for hours on end.


I wonder - in my more lonely moments - what such fronts would have seemed like in the 1800's when there was no electricity and few cities, just small isolated settlements or little towns with the wind howling in the trees and the darkness. It would, I imagine, make for long nights and a great deal of introspection.

I will get up from there and prepare for the drive to work this morning, watching and listening to the wind sing outside my car with songs of the frozen north and mountains I cannot see from here and snow laden plains.  I will listen, and I will be glad.