Anemoi

[rejectomorph]

Notos and Zephyros blustered about the house today slamming doors and making the curtains billow, and out back threw dessicated rose petals into the bowl of water I provide for the stray cats. But as they kept the day cool I didn't mind. As far as I'm concerned, Notos and Zephyros are welcome every day in June when, instead of storms, they bring the freshness of the distant ocean.

Locally this is called the Delta Breeze, but I like to think of it as the two Gods in playful mood, chasing one another up the mountains and through the woodlands. Then, by night, the breath of napping Boreas sighs in the pines while his brothers return to the Pacific's shore to toss spindrift across the waves by moonlight. And where is Euros all this while? Somewhere waiting for the late summer or the fall, when he'll send the desert heat rushing through the canyons, perhaps to whip fires to frenzy. I'll enjoy watching Notos' and Zephyros' play while I can. It's easy enough to toss the rose petals from the cats' water bowl.

Comments

[rejectomorph]

It's only the faith of literature, though. I was fascinated by ancient Greece from the time I was about ten years old, and I read book after book about Greek Mythology and ancient Greek culture.

While I never quite believed that Pan was actually lurking in the dry hills of suburban Los Angeles (where, in those days, cows sometimes still grazed), I was always able to imagine him there, playing his pipe for a group of Nymphs and Satyrs along a slow stream embowered by exotic eucalyptus trees at the edge of my neighborhood.

Eventually the stream was entombed in a concrete storm drain, but I occasionally still lapse into the Olympian metaphors which I absorbed in childhood, and which have wound their way through western literature for some three thousand years.