The Night and the Wind

It’s 1:56 a.m., and the temperature rests at a pleasant sixty degrees. I’m sitting on the patio in the dead of night, listening to the tumultuous wind as it gusts and sighs. There’s something about this hour — the way the moon glows behind the cover of clouds as they’re ushered onward by high crosswinds. The wind seems to flail ineffectively against me, able only to tousle my hair with a practiced sort of menace.

The thing is, the wind and I became friends long ago.

I remember it vividly: the autumn of 2003, when I worked as the store manager at Brooks Brothers in Lee, Massachusetts. All my life, I’d kept my hair short — never longer than an inch and a half — for reasons I still don’t fully understand. Perhaps I hoped it would disguise the thinning at my widow’s peak. That year, everything changed: the car accident, the beginning of my transition, and the coming birth of my daughter, Autumn — her name a mirror of the very season in which I discovered my love of the wind.

The store stood on a hill, near the New York border, an outlet mall perched on the very edge of the ridge. I was about four months into hormone therapy then. During my lunch breaks or after my shifts, I’d walk the perimeter paths, thinking, praying. I was growing my hair out, determined that even if it was thin, it was mine — better that than any wig. I never did have the confidence to wear one like so many of my sisters and queens. By then my hair had reached three or four inches, a shaggy mop-top still unshaped.

It was a crisp fall afternoon, the wind blowing fiercely through the mall’s open-air corridors, funneled by the architecture itself until it roared over the cliff’s edge. I’d stopped wearing hats after learning they could worsen thinning, so that day I faced the wind bareheaded. Around 2:30 p.m., standing at the far edge near the drop, I let the gusts sweep through my hair with abandon. I could feel the strands, the roots themselves, waving in time with the breath of the air.

My hair was everywhere — and it felt glorious. That tingling dance as the wind whispered across my scalp was like the hand of God in motion. The air was rich with the scent of fallen leaves, the mountainsides aglow in gold and orange. From that perch, I felt utterly present — grounded, alive, and known by the One who made both the wind and me.

Tonight, the memory returned with perfect clarity, and I had to share it with you, my friends.

As always,

Dust