Who's peekin' out from under a stairway
Calling a name that's lighter than air
Who's bending down to give me a rainbow
Everyone knows it’s Windy.
Looking through my photo archives, I note that often, as March prepares to go out like a lion, or a lamblike lion (Chesterton, in Orthodoxy: “It is constantly assured…that when the lion lies down with the lamb the lion becomes lamb-like. But that is brutal annexation and imperialism on the part of the lamb.”), the wind starts blowing in an odd direction for a while.
That directional wind is what the Spaniards call a "Gregale", (Catalan: Gregal), a wind that can occur during times when a low-pressure area moves across a large body of water and causes a strong, cool, northeasterly wind. The name derives from the Italian grecale, “Greeky”, because you always blame the place from whence the bad wind comes (Europeans just hate The Azores).
On Lake Michigan, you really notice it more on land than on the water (which looks relatively calm), mostly because the flags fly in a weird direction and all the dust bunnies and accumulated winter trash is blown out from those corners and crevices where they’d settled for the long winter. The Gregal is nature’s little Roomba.
Okay, nature’s pretty big Roomba.
And Windy has stormy eyes
That flash at the sound of lies!
(what a jolly song for such threatening lyrics. The Association shouldn’t have called that song “Windy”. They should have called it “Gregal”.)
Thurber! Man, I miss every dog I’ve ever had. Loved that song as a kid too.
Props for quoting Chesterton for weather conditions, or anything else.