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The wind is an animal.

It rumbles and licks and bucks and scours.

It is a cat twining around the canyon rim.

It is a lizard finding footholds in the barest hints of sandstone concavity.

It boils over the rock’s edge to upend tourist hats like a playful monkey.

It roars like a lion unsure whether it will attack.

It lifts fingers from their resting position at my sides like a dog nosing for affection.

It converses with the trees; the pines allow the song to develop between its needles.

Sometimes, those trees cede the branches on one side if the wind is strong and consistent enough.

Oh fine, the trees say, as if they are the grandparents and the wind is the child. Each gust is fresh and new.

Then the trees say alright, settle down, but laugh when the wind doesn’t.

Instead, it throws itself into two pirouettes and then trips on a rock.

Oh, little one, thinks the tree. To have your energy.

Then the tree stands solid and allows itself to be bent. Remembering its time as a sapling when it performed a pas de deux with its friend the wind.

Now, they are different. The wind has refreshed itself with the spinning of the earth. The tree has rooted itself with the helping hand of gravity. They have changed but not in the same way.

The wind is an animal. It nips at its old-new friend the tree and laughs its way forward.