by Ed Davis (June 2026)
“Where did you just go?” she said. It was more an observation than a question.
She was sitting on the bench next to me, our regular bench in Central Park, just a few metro stops from our Turtle Bay walk-up. Though she could clearly see that I hadn’t gone anywhere, she could also see that I had.
We’d been talking in the unhurried way that we often do, about what we had read in the morning paper, and our plans for dinner, and our kids and grandkids—we would be seeing them in a few weeks—and the news among our dwindling circle of friends. I was asking about the latest of them to have weathered a health scare when, in mid-sentence, I stopped.
“It was the wind,” I said.
“Wind?”
“More a breeze.” I could still sense it on my forehead and cheeks, and the way it ever-so-slightly stirred my close-cropped beard. The hair on my exposed forearms, below my carefully rolled-up sleeves, telegraphed the movement. The backs of my hands, their skin strewn with age spots, also picked up the almost imperceptible eddies. “It felt too good not to notice.”
“Odd,” she said, not disputing or doubting, but considering. “I wasn’t conscious of it.”
“Usually,” my turn to consider, “I’m not conscious of it either. Not until lately.”
We sat silently then. Perhaps she felt the moving air—I’m sure she was trying—though a stillness seemed to have settled around us. We had shared so many things in our half century together, it would be unlike us not to attempt to share this.
***
Could I tell her what it felt like?
Would that be fair?
Not until lately I’d told her, as though I could not remember exactly when it first happened. Yet I knew precisely—as precisely as I remembered all the signature intimacies of my life, so many of them shared with her.
I’d been by myself on this very bench, a book open on my knee.
One I’d read before.
It was not a strong wind, though to call it a breeze seems inadequate. It was, rather, a touch, as sensitive and feathery and tentative as the first stroke of fingers on unfamiliar skin. There was an invitation in it. Engage, it seemed to be saying.
Engage with me.
***
I don’t know when I first became conscious of the wind.
From the moment we are born currents are stirring around us. The doctor’s swat that elicits our first cry comes with a rush of air. We create our own small slipstreams with our first breaths. Wind chaffs our cheeks and tousles our hair, turns our pinwheels, and troubles our waters. I do remember a summer night—I was thirteen—when the air was so moist and hot and still that the only respite came from an ancient oscillating fan placed next to my bed. I lay under a sheet. The faint scent of the laboring fan motor—of dust, old lubricant, and hot electrical wiring—and the hum of the whirring blades, came to me along with the modulating waves of relief. I might not have described it as sensual then, but I remember it that way now.
Sensual, but not intimate.
Not like the natural wind.
Though we are immersed in air, the wind—when it chooses to—embraces us. Its pressure, its warmth or chill, its laying-on of ephemeral hands, is as changeable as a lover’s caress. It offers itself without condition, whispering in our ears the sweetest of nothings. Or howling. It arrives unbidden, lingers or doesn’t, then leaves. Whether we accept its overtures, or are even conscious of them, is subject to no one’s sensibilities but our own.
Why have I begun to sense it in this way only now?
In my seventy years I’ve struggled against my share of headwinds, and been relieved when those same winds were at my back. I’ve despaired at the wind’s indiscriminate destruction, and I’ve watched, mesmerized, as soaring birds circle effortlessly on its invisible thermals. I expect, even welcome, a certain amount of buffeting. Without the storm, I might take the calm for granted. I’m grateful that clouds meander, and leaves rustle, and grasses stir. I’ve seen wind push snow drifts and drive dust storms. When short of breath I have turned, not quite in desperation, to face the wind and feel it help fill my lungs.
What is it filling now that it did not fill before?
***
“Have you felt your wind again?”
We are sitting quietly on our bench, days later, our morning conversation concluded.
“Interesting that you should call it my wind,” I answer her, without answering her question. “I hadn’t thought about the wind as belonging to me, or to anyone.”
“No, you mistake my meaning.” She wasn’t correcting but explaining. “It isn’t ownership, but individuality I’m thinking of.”
“You don’t believe that the same wind blows for all of us?”
“I think it depends.” She had always chosen her words carefully. On our first date I attributed her occasionally halting manner of speaking to shyness. On our second date, she dispelled me of that notion by relieving me of my virginity. It was not shyness shaping her sometimes awkward sentences, but a quest for precision. “With so many variables influencing its movements and intensity, how could we experience it as the same wind unless we were physically very, very close to one another?”
“As close as we are right now?”
“Closer, I think,” she smiled and slid toward me, erasing the few inches that separated us on the bench. I put my arm around her shoulders, as I had on that first date and countless times since. She leaned into me. “But even this close,” I heard her muffled words, “I think your wind has always been yours, and mine has always been mine.”
I’d been worried about sharing this new awareness with her, afraid that she might be jealous of something so private, so personal. Instead, she was giving me permission to experience it on my own.
***
You won’t find wind on the Periodic Table of Elements. I knew that, yet felt compelled to look it up anyway, and got appropriately winded climbing all those stairs to The Rose Reading Room at the library by Bryant Park. Wind’s elemental designation is far, far older than any chart made by man. Like fire, earth, and water, wind has been recognized as an element since the beginning. Recognized, but unlike the others, also invisible. We drink water, float on it, and funnel it to create power. We plunge our tools and hands into the earth and work it to grow the food that sustains us. Fire gives us light, and heat, and the mesmerizing movement of its flames. Withhold any of them and our days are numbered. Withhold the wind— and the air that is it’s medium—and our demise is measured in minutes.
Is that why my relationship with it is changing now? Like heartbeats, breaths are finite. The notion that we are arbitrarily allotted a certain number of each via some divine calculus seems unreasonable to me. The fact that in our time we will only experience just so many seems undeniable. If I had lately been feeling some suggestion of a warning with my new sense of the wind, an airborne admonition to finally appreciate what, up until now, I have taken for granted, I might entertain the possibility that there is some intention behind it. But there is no such suggestion. There is just the wind. There is my body’s new awareness of its invisible interactions with it. There is the pleasure and peace those interactions bring.
***
She fell while coming down the stairs to collect the mail.
We had known for years that we needed to get a ground floor place, but none had opened up in our building and we liked our neighborhood too much to move.
“It was a short fall, only a few feet,” the paramedic said, trying to be encouraging. But he didn’t understand the nature of such things. Her fall began with our refusal to relocate, and ended weeks later when, in the company of our remaining friends, I surreptitiously spread her ashes in the woods above the boathouse in Central Park, the woods we had so often looked upon from our favorite bench.
I am sitting here now.
My grief is indescribable.
I don’t mean that is unbearable, though at times it seems that it might be.
I mean that I lack the language to understand what I am feeling, let alone to convey it to another. I don’t doubt that there are stages of grief, definable elements on the periodic table of personal loss. They codify what grief does. But they are no better at capturing what grief is than the Periodic Table of Elements is at capturing the feel of the wind on my closed eyelids as I sit here on our bench. No, she does not speak to me in the wind. I understand how I might find that comforting, might convince myself that the wind’s caress is hers, and that I hear her voice in its whispers.
I don’t.
What I hear is the roll and rattle of stroller wheels on the asphalt path along the lake.
I hear strains of guitar music coming across the water from a busker at The Bethesda Fountain.
I hear the murmur of traffic out on 5th Avenue.
The regular rhythms of runner’s footfalls, some so fleet as to be almost silent, others slapping the ground, each to a cadence as unique as a signature. Snatches of conversation; hurried, contemplative, many in languages I don’t understand.
All carried to me on the wind.
My wind, she had called it, understanding, before I did, that her experience of it—my experience—was singular, just as our perception of color is singular. We invented the word blue, and agree that it has a meaning, but because we cannot perceive it through any eyes but our own, we have no choice but to accept as an act of faith that the blue you see, and the blue I see are the same.
So it is with grief.
So it is with love.
Both are as individual, insubstantial, and essential as the wind.
Without them, I can imagine her saying—as I sit alone on the bench we so often shared—our demise would be measured in minutes.
And so, I open my eyes, and breathe.
Table of Contents
Ed Davis is the author of the novella In All Things, which Kirkus Reviews called “…powerful; beautifully written, well-observed and effective.” He produced and directed the documentary Faces of Chidamoyo. He is a runner, backpacker, and traveler, and has been to Zimbabwe, Peru, Tibet, Nepal, and soon Bhutan. His travel collection, Road Stories, has recently been an Amazon top ten best seller.
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