Three Zephyrs

Three zephyrs went by Darjeeling one day. He didn’t notice the first one until the other two had gone by. It was a clear Indian summer day in Kansas and he was working out in the winery, wiring in some overhead fluorescent light fixtures. He stopped to take a break with his cat, Zeeb, and to have a cold Mick’s. Walking into the backyard he grabbed some dead tree limbs that had shaken out of the ash and walnut trees and threw them on the pile he had started in the outside fireplace next to the octagonal deck. He kicked his way through the walnut leaves carrying Zeeb in one hand and Mickey in the other, laughing at the American flag emblems on his new Chippewa boots. “Last pair of boots I’ll ever buy in this world, Zeeb.” Zeeb looked up at him and purred. “Om Mani Padme Hum, Om Mani Padme Hum,” Darjeeling purred back at Zeeb assuring a higher order of birth for the cat in its next nine lifetimes. As he drug down the dregs of the Mick’s, a little puff of wind pushed him along. It felt good. It was warm and it swirled around the trees, knocking the last vestiges of the hedge leaves off and twisting the tops of the trees in a circlular fashion. He didn’t think anything about it, that before that moment when it intruded on him it had been completely calm with no clouds in the sky. He didn’t notice the swirling wind pick up the leaves on the ground and scoot them away from the fallen walnuts. He just noticed the downed limbs and was intent on adding them to the fireplace and starting a nice outside fire for the evening. The wind turned around and came back at him, trying to get his attention. The hair on Zeeb’s back stood up and he growled a low growl in his throat. “Easy, Zeeb,” Darjeeling let the cat drop onto the deck and continued to search for dead firewood. He thought about playing T’ai Chi Chuan on the deck that he had built for the little green people but then forgot about that, too, as the wind now blew one of the old fashioned lawn chairs over. He remained oblivious to it. It whistled through the screens on the windows blowing out puffs of dust. It rattled the half-open garage door and blew over one of the honey bee hive boxes he had stacked up outside. In a last ditch effort to get his attention, the wind clacked the clappers of the wooden wind chime hanging under the redwood stairway and Darjeeling looked up a bit as Zeeb took off running back to the winery with his back arched and tail frizzed out like a Halloween Black Cat.
Darjeeling stuffed the cardboard Mickey’s case box under the wood and stuffed some leaves into it. He lit it with only one match. That was his code with regard to starting fires. You only use one match to start a small fire and then build up to as big a fire as you want. The leaves caught first and then the cardboard. He watched as the twigs he had lain on the box fired up and then the pieces of bark and small seasoned hedge limbs that followed. Soon the fire was blazing and he continued to stoke it with increasingly bigger logs, including some nice big red oak logs he had pilfered from the church in town. It was still early in the afternoon and he returned to his work in the winery, stopping every now and then to have a cold beer and go poke around on the fire. The fireplace was built out of native limestone and mortar and did a good job of directing the heat toward the deck. You could sit there in one of the old lawn chairs and be warm and that’s what he liked. The fireplace held a good supply of wood and he had extended the front with limestone flat on the ground to make a place to stand if the ground was muddy. He was standing there admiring the fire when the second zephyr of wind came by. This one he noticed. It got his attention right away. Blowing in from the South it had come right across the fireplace and sparks flew at him. The heat was enough to cause him to back up until he came in contact with the deck. A spark blew onto his Moosecreek shirt and burned a little hole in it. “Kind of like a seed pop,” Darjeeling lamented at the pinhole in his new shirt.
“Stephen.” He barely heard his whispered name. “Stephen.” There it was again. There was no one there, he knew that. It seemed to be the wind saying his name as it tore across the back yard like a dust devil, spiraling leaves up into its vortex. He chased after it but it was already gone. “Weird,” Darjeeling thought, but then weird was part of his life. A major part. He chucked a couple of more branches on the fire, the last ones he had scrounged around the yard thinking that this fire was big enough and that he didn’t need one that would get out of control. Heading back toward the winery, he looked back over his shoulder to see that the fire was all right and that the wind was gone. It was calm again. And warm. He stuck to his work the rest of the day, coming in at sundown, stumbling a little under the influence of the beers in his head. After supper, he sat at the table thinking about the wind, until he became drowsy and headed off to bed.