Listen to the Wind

Poppy, a sweet young girl, was listening to the wind. The wind told her things she couldn’t hear from other people, and she didn’t think other people could hear the wind like she could. Poppy sat on the highest accessible branch of her favorite tree, with her face tilted up and her hair whipping around her head like Medusa’s.

The wind whispered, “There will be a storm tomorrow.

Poppy looked at the sky. Blue, clear, and cloudless, it was absolutely the opposite of the kind of sky you would expect the day before a storm. But Poppy had learned to trust the wind. The wind knew things. If she was quiet and she listened carefully, it told her what it knew.

It was in this way that she learned that her grandmother was going to die. Poppy climbed down from her tree and sat at the frail old woman’s bedside, talking to her. She spoke of the places her grandmother had been, places like Paris and Rio de Janeiro, places people always dreamed of going to.

Poppy’s grandmother had had a long and wonderful life, but it was ending. The old woman’s watery blue eyes remembered. They remembered seeing the Eiffel Tower for the first time, they remembered staring in wonder at the lush green rainforests of the Amazon. And they strained to keep looking at the green eyes hovering over them, surrounded by long dark hair. The blue remembered looking out over a green sea, a color not unlike the eyes of her granddaughter, from the top of a Caribbean cruise ship.

The blue remembered, and the green watched sadly as the blue slowly slipped away until two lifeless blue buttons stared at the ceiling, unseeing.

Poppy shed a silent tear, but she knew she could not change what had happened. So she went back outside, climbed to the highest accessible branch in her favorite tree, and listened to the wind. For if she was quiet, and listened carefully, the wind told her what it knew.