My husband is a forester. Each year, for about 25 years, he supervised the planting of many millions of trees. Forestry is an involved science including soil, weather, surveying, sheer guts during snake season, and the ability to spin a yarn. We don’t do much camping because, for him, it’s like going to work.

Paper money, extreme macro (Photo credit: kevin dooley)

Trees make money.

Usually, near large forests, you also find factories that convert trees into light poles, lumber, or paper. Often we have lived near a paper mill.

Living near a paper mill means that when the barometer and the wind are wrong, you shut the windows, period. Government environmental regulators assure us the vapors from the mill are breathable, but our noses don’t care. It’s roughly like a diaper pail. They say it’s just steam off the pulp digesters.

Too bad.

So, the wife of a forester, and all her neighbors, develop a second sense for finite changes in weather. We can somehow know when it’s going to be a shut-window day. The air pressure lowers. The humidity may rise. The breeze drifts from the south, usually.

Shut the windows.

There is no fresh air out there.

People are less wise about spiritual winds, and it is to our shame. Maybe opening our lives to other influx, once was good, in some way, maybe not. But the political/doctrinal wind out there, now, carries unacceptable stench. The government assures us we can thrive while breathing it.

Does that mean we must leave the window open?

They wish they could force us to open the window. They try every way, including illegal ways, to make us open the window. Some of us blindly believe in the open-window health approach. We know it stinks, but fresh air is good for us, right? How can our children grow up strong without fresh air, hmm?

The barometer and the wind are wrong. It is a shut-window Day.

The worms know.

Sometimes, living in a compost pile is better than too much fresh air.