I put down my book and the breeze whispers hello, gently tickling my shoulders.

The wind started in the not-so-far-off distance, in the purple and blue snow-speckled mountains, hazy with a smoke you can almost taste.

The gust roared across the lake, stirred up by jet skis soaring swiftly over summer waves.

It slows as it approaches the shore, realizing it is in no rush,

for summer has just begun, and at the lake, existing closer to God than anywhere else,

all you feel is calm and all you hear is waves and all you smell is pine.

And so, as the wind reaches me, sitting under an umbrella and out of the sun, it does nothing more than send tendrils of my hair dancing across my back, carrying with it the sounds of girls and their butterfly laughter and the faint honking of geese in flight.

I close my eyes, drop my hand to the warm, coarse sand, and silently welcome the wind.