I could crawl out my bedroom window onto the roof of our kitchen, which was a one-story add on to the two-story house, sticking out to the east. Sometimes I would gp out there and lie one the kitchen roof, on cool, sunny mornings. 

The roof shingles were warm from the sun, but the air was still cool around me, so I would try to soak up as much warmth as I could from the roof against the cool air.

The view from that kitchen roof was the hillside above our fields, a rich forest of tall, graceful trees. And sometimes the wind would come by and brush those trees around. You could see the gusts moving across the canopy, as the leaves would shimmer differently when the wind hit them. The shimmers came in waves, sweeping across the hillside.

Something would happen to me where  I would start to imagine the waving trees were actually creating the wind, not reacting to it. That the trees were tossing from side to side and fanning up the wind. I could maintain this illusion as I saw the waves of wind moving across the hillside, changing from green to silver as the they whipped the wind up.

I knew that the wind was moving the trees, not that the trees were bending and waving the wind into existence, but there was something fetching about the idea that the trees were dancing the wind to life.

I could almost hear symphonic music, along with the rushing of the wind, music that drove the great emotional dance gestures that the trees were performing.

I went through this ritual often, lying there caught between the cool air and the warm shingles, while the trees performed the majestic ballet and propelled the wind along.

I don’t know if I ever mentioned this silly, romantic, poetic illusion to anyone in the family. Seemed a bit too risky to expose that much of my inner absurdities to the older ones who probably harbored some sense that I was daft.