The wind blew today.

People swept in through the door looking frazzled by it. They hesitated to make plans, avoided the trails, declared it a bad day to go watch the cranes.

Oddly, I welcomed it. The wind twirled and tangled my hair, pulled at me. Made me want to walk down the river in the footprints of the cranes. Made me want to fly north.

I felt the wind bringing spring in, more than any other day so far. Mostly I love winter. I love it for no reason I can explain. The arrival of spring to me means the end of winter for another whole year. It means the cranes are leaving.

But today the thought didn’t seem so bad. The wind came up and blew all the resistance out of me. The bison ran in thundering circles of agreement, a swirl of dust behind them.

My two youngest daughters and I get in the hot tub most evenings and watch the stars come out. We see ghostly geese fly overhead against a backdrop of stars. See bats flitting about at dusk. Watch the changing shape of the moon and call out constellations.

Tonight jet trails tracked across the sunset like a dust cloud behind a bison herd and we watched as the wind swept them across the dome of the sky, pulling at them until they looked less like a smooth trail and more like a toothed zipper.

I understand why the origin stories of the first people indigenous to this prairie were rooted in the sky – the sun and moon and stars, tornado winds dropping the first people onto the earth, storms marking the seasons, the thunder of hooves on packed dirt or gray wings against the sky calling in the spring wind. I understand the feeling of looking up at this sky, feeling the wind pull at you, and thinking surely that’s where you came from.