howlin' down the cumberland

As always, I awoke with a song in my head, this time John Hiatt:

"Caught like a deer in my own headlights
frozen on this road tonight.
I had a fix on the brightest star,
now I don't know where you are.
North is South and East is West,
where's the love that I knew best?
Shifting in this icy wind,
howlin' down the Cumberland."

What does this mean? I awoke in the arms of my sweetie of 29 years, so the "I don't know where you are" hardly fits. However, it WAS unbelievably windy (albeit not icy) yesterday. Perhaps my subconscious was listening for the rattle of the sliding door, the hiss of the palm fronds, the telltale sounds that would tell me the winds had not abated.

But they had, and yet I still feel uneasy. Apparently, it's a common occurrence here in the spring especially, but it takes some getting used to. When winds get up to 50-60 mph, it shakes everything, and picks up anything that's not nailed down and sets it skittering along the street or sailing over the house. The power flickers on and off, and it stirs up so much dust and pollen that I hardly dare to go outside. It takes me back to the hurricanes of my childhood in Florida. It stirred up feelings of flight or fright, but I'd nowhere to go and nothing to do with the energy, so I spent yesterday pacing the cage, and today I still feel a leftover restlessness.

There was a brushfire a couple miles from our house and in that wind it could have easily gotten out of control, burned along the mountainside and found us in our little condo and taken away everything we take for granted. Perhaps that's why I feel restless. I was just reminded that what's here today can blow away tomorrow.