Elements of the Wind

Abstract

am not a fan of those who say, There are two types of people: those who love cell phones, and those who hate cell phones. Another example: There are two kinds of people: those who will only drink bottled water, and those who think bottled water is a waste. The variations are endless, although endlessly similar, and find this inclination to divide humanity into two clear-cut groups limiting, naive, absurd. So perhaps am saying that there are two types of people: those who divide other people into simplistic groups, and those who do not. And perhaps there are two further types of people: those who admire this sort of breakdown, and those who do not. can see, suppose, the attraction of this remedial math. Simplicity is seductive, clarity is seductive. am, on occasion, seduced by each. Even so, such superficial division seems, in the end, dismissible. That being said, think it may be possible to say there are two types of people: those who love wind, and those who hate it. Being firmly ensconced in the former group, enduringly in love with wind, it came as a shock to me, fairly deeply into my adulthood, to learn that not everyone shared this affection. I hate wind. These words were uttered by an acquaintance as we cruised at a leisurely pace on her pontoon boat along the Seneca River in central New York. It was a merely breezy not windy spring afternoon, a weekday, and aside from the occasional heron or gull, the river was not crowded. Her words weren't spat with hostility exactly, but were said with considerable crankiness under the assumption, think, that her passengers implicitly agreed with her. This was the first time had ever heard anyone acknowledge a quarrel