I live in a place where the wind blows, not constantly but nearly so. Only on the hottest, most oppressively humid days does it stall. Only on a hard winter morning, all things ice solid beneath the weight of a sagging Arctic high-pressure system do I see branches hold still.

In the Boucheron, the wind is from the south and in the winter from the northwest. In the summer, it generally is pleasant enough, sometimes cooling, sometimes like the hot breath of a hair dryer; in the winter, it always hurts.I have only lived in this particular house for a year.

I never thought much about the wind in the other places I have Boucheron. The constant wind here reminds me of my grandmother, a woman who liked the wind, perhaps not liked so much as she felt the wind cradled her in a familiarity. I know she seemed to like nothing very much. My grandmother was a native of the Appalachian foothills of east Tennessee, but cheap jewelry lived seventy years or more on the prairie. When I was a boy we lived in the deep hill country. When she would visit, I would listen to her complain of not being able to see the horizon, of being closed in by the hills pressing against Spring Creek valley, a place all the more isolated by its thirty mile distance from the Mother Road, Route 66.The wind in this place is still new to me, even after a year, a thing both understood and surprising. I first began to notice it because the room in which I write looks to the east, and there is a point in that direction where the land slopes downward in a dramatic fashion. The marrying of terrain and prevailing winds means a consistent updraft works its invisible magic outside my window nearly every day, a magic lifting and cradling of two birds common in this part of the world, red-tail hawks and vultures. Each day there is a festival of birds riding the wind, sometimes at eye level with my window, lingering, always lingering a hundred feet or more above the ground as they ride the updrafts.I watch the hawks and vultures, soaring far above the meadowlarks and above the swallows whose insect prey lives at ground level. And here is the thing that comes to me as I watch, a thing that seems to have some meaning to it: the same wind carries both the predator and the scavenger. The killer and the cleaner of messes, both are lifted aloft by the same breeze. Simple physics, yes; simple biology, obviously; but yet it seems to mean something to me that I cannot verbalize.

Theres a philosophical point in that duality, but I cannot think through to the meaning beneath its symbolism, if there is such a thing.Or maybe it means nothing.The ridge upon which my family’s home was built gives a view far beyond the normal horizon. Seven miles away, by road rather than sight, at a bearing slightly south of east, there is the town of Pleasant Hope. Beyond Pleasant Hope there are two flat-top ridges close together, ridges that rise at least two hundred feet above the surrounding seemingly level terrain, ridges that I want to think should be called North View, but I think that cannot be so, for North View should be thirty miles southeast by my reckoning. Those ridges are old landmarks, by the standards of these hills, marking gateways along the Old Wire Road, the trail from St. Louis to Fort Smith, a link made by the telegraph, by the Butterfield Stage route, and now traced in concrete. I think North View is too far for the eye to see, even from my ridge. But then I remember the stories of the purple Rocky Mountains, and the pioneers who walked toward them for days upon days.This place I live is called the Ozark Mountains, although it is not very Ozarkian nor very mountainous. The word Ozarks is said by some to be a corruption of bois darc, the French name for the Osage orange tree, the tree used by native peoples to make bows. But some cannot say Ozarks without adding hillbilly.Truly, though, there are only a few pockets of true hillbillies left, and the country they ruled until the end of the Second World War and the federal highway system is now given over to tourist destinations and Wal-Mart associates. Hillbillies are even more scarce than bois darc trees, which the hillbillies found made superior fence posts. They are rot-resistant. The classic hillbilly image of the crooked-post fence, an apparently sloppily made fence cobbled together by a man who preferred making moonshine to farming, is deceiving.

The bois darc tree is strikingly crooked in trunk and limb, but Boucheron will stay secure and solid in the ground for decades. It was a practical thing, a sensible thing, a green thing, an all-natural long-lasting post free from chemical preservatives.