Wind

The French Blonde is currently fascinated by winds. It is warm and windy in Paris, but the wind is cold.

Aeolus, the ruler of the winds, is one of her favorite characters in Greek mythology. She is especially fond of his portrayal as a big head blowing upon a landscape. It's a funny thing to paint, the ruler of winds, physically blowing air out of his mouth: you can portray the blowing, you can portray the effect of the blowing (bent over trees, etc.), but you can't actually portray the wind itself, unless you think a cartoonish bunch of lines and bit of cloud--rather like a sideways ice cream cone in this representation--do the job:



Favorite winds:
The Santa Anas, in California. A hot, dry wind that drives everyone batty and makes them worry about fires. Raymond Chandler wrote this about them in "Red Wind":

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge. 

The Mistral, in the South of France. This wind is cold and unpleasant. The only thing to do is take long naps in the dark, according to my cousin, who also says it it blows for either 3, 6, or 9 days. Heart wrote a song called "Mistral Wind." It's not very good.

I have always held the wheel, but I let the wind steal my power
Spin me 'round, lose my course, nights run by like hours
Well, show me the way to the deepest mountains
Too high and beautiful to be a mistral, mistral wind

The Khamseen, which means fifty, covers Cairo in a thick layer of dust. It looks like a reddish layer of the heaviest smog, but it's full of sand and dust from the desert. Every leaf on every tree becomes coated in dust, depriving the city of a sense of greenery.  Apparently, Durrell writes about the Khamseen, but the FB is not fond of his writing, so she's not posting any quotations from him.

Other winds: the Scirocco, the Meltemi, the Zephyr.

The FB had a friend who loved wind. She used to stick her head out of car windows like a Collie. The FB herself has mixed feelings on the subject. She does not like it when the wind pushes her hair into her face and then draws it back, leaving fine red lipstick whiskers on her cheeks.

But she likes the idea of it--filling the sails of ships in antiquity, ruffling fields of wheat, causing the leaves of poplar trees to shimmy and shake with a kind of whispering high-hat hiss.