By Jim Belshaw
Of the Journal
Not to split meteorological hairs or anything, but what exactly is the difference between "breezy" and "windy?"
Is this a science question or one of those subjective things we civilians prefer to work out for ourselves?
Not that I'm complaining about the wind.
Live here long enough and you learn to accept it as pretty much the only thing we have in the way of weather extremes.
No hurricanes, hardly a blizzard, a rare tornado, maybe, sometimes a flood.
But for the most part, the wind is the only dependable weather complaint we have.
Well, there was that woman a few years ago who moved to Rio Rancho from California and went scurrying back to Santa Barbara during the monsoon season. She said the thunder scared her like nothing she'd heard in her life.
She's the anomaly, though. The wind is the only steady weather complaint we have, and, even then, it's just an irritant, except when it blows up fires and sends smoke and dreams billowing into the sky above the Manzanos.
I'm probably feeling a little guilty because my cousin, Rich, came out to Albuquerque from Chicago for a week, and the poor guy couldn't have seen much most days because the wind was up.
And it was up in that special way that once caused a co-worker of mine to look out at the West Mesa and say, "I feel like a colonist on Mars."
That would have been a windy day, not a breezy one.
This time of year does have one fine redeeming quality for me: It reminds me that I once got a poet call at work. It's the only good thing I can think of about the wind.
Not many jobs have the potential of a poet call.
It happened nine years ago. The caller left a message, worried that I'd said Tennyson when I meant Shelley while trying to get a handle on the wind.
I've looked upon that poet call as one of the great perks of the news business. It's right up there with New Mexico's existential highway information sign: "Gusty Winds May Exist."
Oh, the things you could do with that in a UNM honors seminar. (You'll notice I said the things "you" could do, not me. I'm not the one you want saying anything existential in a UNM honors class.)
The only reason I'm asking about "windy" and "breezy" is that, if the forecast is "windy," we all know what's coming.
Second Street will fade into a brown haze by midafternoon; the Sandias will be beyond the naked eye by 4 p.m. and the backyard will become a kind of tumbleweed collection point.
But what happens if it's only "breezy," officially speaking.
As I write, the very Albuquerque Journal you hold in your hand says the day will be "breezy."
But it's only midmorning, and already it's a three-chimer at my house, which is windy in my nonmeteorological book.
We have three wind chimes strategically placed in the front and the back to allow for the maximum amount of cacophony in May.
The delicate one out back will announce a wind that is more like a whisper. The big ones in front need more than a breeze, and, at the moment, they sound like something important might be happening at the Vatican.
It takes a wind, not a breeze, to make that kind of noise.
The big trees down the street are waving back and forth, too. Can "breezy" move the big trees like that?
So I'm not complaining, only wondering what it might be like if we had the kind of existential highway sign that said "Breezy winds may exist."
Maybe if we can get one of the TV stations to hire a weatherperson who's into Sartre and Camus ...
Write to Jim Belshaw at The Albuquerque Journal, P.O. Drawer J, Albuquerque, NM 87103; telephone— 823-3930; e-mail— jbelshaw@abqjournal.com.
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