Perhaps the parrot was somewhat put out, but no terrible harm was done in these two incidents. Still, the possibility of unremitting permanence represented by their changes stayed alive in the minds of the citizens of Lipara, its threat continuously resurfacing and growing to monstrous proportions in all imaginations as each summer neared its end. It was one thing to be a goat-headed clown with feather duster arms and carrot legs for a few hours, but to remain in that condition for a lifetime was something else entirely. The Dreaming Wind was playful, it was insane, it was chaotic, and it could be dangerous. Little did any of us suspect for generations past and for most of my long life that it could be anything else.

  Then a few years ago, the strange wind did something so unusual it shocked even us white-haired veterans of its mad work. It was nearing the end of a long lazy summer, memorable for its blue days and cool nights, and the leaves were beginning to curl on the elm trees, the first few early crickets were beginning to chirp their Winter’s Tale. Each of us, in our own particular way, was steeling ourselves for the yearly onslaught of the mischievous event, offering up prayers to God or reassuring ourselves by reassuring others that as certain as the wind would come, it would pass, and we would again enjoy the normal pleasures of life in Lipara. Constable Garrett did as he had always done, and chose three reliable children, paying them a dime a day, to go to the edge of the forest and listen intently for a few hours after school for the sound of water running through the tree tops. Everywhere, families made plans as to where they would meet up when the event occurred, what room they would weather the storm in, what songs they would sing together to quell their collective fear.

  The end of August came and went without incident, and the delay heightened the apprehension of the arrival of the Dreaming Wind. We older folks reminded the younger that it was known to have come as late as the middle of the second week in September and that it was to be remembered that the wind could not be dictated to but had a definite mind of its own. During these days, every curtain lifting in a breeze, every gust dispersing the gossamer seed of a dandelion skeleton, caused blood pressures to rise and neck hairs to stand on end. By the middle of the first week in September the alarm had been falsely raised four times, and Constable Garrett, whose gamey knee was beginning to bother him from the long climbs to his roof, jokingly said he might just as well set out a sleeping bag up there.

  By the end of the second week in September, nerves were frayed, tempers flared, and children cried for no reason. The aura of anxiety produced by the anticipation of the wind had begun to make Lipara a little mad even before its arrival. Miss Toth, standing in front of her class one day, could not remember for the life of her what 57 divided by 19 was no matter how many times she tapped her ruler against the black board. She had to have Peggy Frushe, one of the older girls, run across the square to the apothecary’s shop to inquire as to the answer to the problem.

  Beck Harbuth, the apothecary, couldn’t help out just then even though he knew the answer was 3, for he had absentmindedly filled a prescription for Grandmother Young with a bottle full of laxative pills instead of the usual heart medicine, and had to brush past Peg and chase the old woman down the street. In his pursuit, he collided with Mildred Johnson who was riding her chicken eggs to the market on the front of her bike. Sitting in the road amidst the cracked shell and splattered yoke debris of their sudden meeting, Harbuth apologized to Mildred for the accident and she merely replied in a loud disgusted tone, “Don’t worry Beck, it’s all the fault of the damn wind.”

  Grandmother Young was only a few paces ahead of the collision of the apothecary and the egg woman, and because her hearing was weak, she never noticed a thing, but Colonel Pudding, who was riding his usual perch atop the left shoulder of his owner, did. He lit into the sky, carrying with him the last phrase he’d heard, which was “The damn wind,” and, as was his practice when he heard a phrase that caught his fancy, began screeching this alarm in the mimicked voice of she who had uttered it. Constable Garrett, sitting in his office with the window open, heard someone cry, “Mama, the damn wind,” sighed, slowly rose from his chair, and started for a fifth time up the steps toward his roof.

  And so it went, a comedy of errors caused by troubled minds—but no one was laughing. Things got worse and worse, until the start of October when the last squadrons of southbound geese passed overhead. The collective worriment of the citizens of Lipara reached a crescendo, nerves snarling like balls of twine in the paws of kittens, and then all fell into a kind of blank exhaustion. Still the wind had not come. A few weeks later, when the first snow fell, blowing down from the north on a mundane autumnal gale, we knew for certain that the Dreaming Wind had done something undreamt of. The realization came to all of us all at once that our strange visitor from the north wasn’t coming, and in that instant, we froze for a moment, wondering what would become of us.

  The sky grew overcast and stayed that muskrat gray for days on end, the temperature dropped to a bitter low, and the lake froze over as if the absence of the wind had plunged the world, itself, into a sodden depression. Cows gave half their normal measure of milk, roosters didn’t bother signaling the dawn, dogs howled at noon, and cats were too weary to chase the mice that invaded Lipara’s houses. The citizens, who had always surmised that the elimination of the Dreaming Wind would fill them with a sense of relief that might border on a kind of spiritual rebirth, now went about their daily tasks as if in mourning. Woven in with the gloom was a pervasive sense of guilt, as if we were being punished for not having appreciated the uniqueness of the blowing insanity when it was upon us.

  The winter, blanketed in snow and set fast in ice, presented in its seemingly static freeze the very opposite of change. Grandmother Young took to her sick bed, complaining she no longer had the energy to go on. Colonel Pudding was beside himself with concern for his owner, and stayed all day in her room with her, pacing back and forth along the headboard of the bed, his fixed-fast bisque lips repeatedly murmuring the word, “Mama.” Constable Garrett’s bad knee was now worse than ever, or so he claimed, and instead of going out on his daily rounds, making sure the town was safe, he stayed at his office desk, playing endless rounds of Solitaire and losing. Pastor Hinch preached a sermon one Sunday in the midst of Lipara’s rigor mortis that exhorted all of the town’s citizens to wake up and effect their own changes, but when it came time for his congregation to answer him in a prayer, two thirds of the response he received was unbridled snoring. Lyda and I sat at the kitchen table, sipping tea, staring just past each other, each of us waiting for the other to begin a conversation and listening to the wind that was not a Dreaming Wind howl outside our door.

  Eventually, with the spring thaw, things picked up somewhat as people returned to the act of living. There was a rote, joyless, hum-drummery to it, though. All seemed drained of interest and beauty. I think it was actually Beck Harbuth, the apothecary, who first mentioned to a customer that he’d noticed he no longer dreamed at night. The customer thought for a moment and then nodded and said that he also could not remember having dreamed since the end of the summer. This observation made the rounds for a week or two, was discussed in all circles, and agreed upon. Eventually Mayor James Meersch the III called an emergency town meeting, the topic of which would be the epidemic of dreamless sleep. It was to be held in the town hall on the following Thursday evening at 7:00 pm.

  The meeting never took place, because in the intervening time between when the Mayor set the date and agenda for that Thursday many people began to realize, now that they were concentrating on the matter, that in fact they were dreaming. What it was, as articulated by Beck Harbuth—the one who started it all—is that nothing unusual was happening in their dreams. The dreams that were dreamt in the days following the failure of the wind were of a most pedestrian nature—eating breakfast, walking to work, reading yesterday’s newspaper, making the bed. There were no chimerical creatures or outlandish happenings to be found in the land of sleep anymore.

  The second reason the meeting was canceled was that Grandmother Young passed away on the Tuesday prior to the day of the meeting, and although she had grown very frail of recent years, the entire town was surprised and saddened by her passing. She was Lipara’s oldest citizen, 125 years, and we all loved her. True to her no-nonsense approach to life, her last words spoken to my wife, who, along with a group of other neighbors were taking shifts watching over her in her final hours, were, “Death has got to be less dull than Lipara these days.”

  Her funeral was as grand as we could muster in our downtrodden condition, and the mayor allocated funds so that a special monument could be erected to her in the town square. As her coffin was lowered into the ground, Colonel Pudding, sitting on a perch we’d positioned near the grave for him, shed babydoll tears and announced his one-word eulogy, “Mama.” Then he spread his wings, took off into the sky, and flew out of sight.

  The days passed into summer and we dreamt our dreams of eating peas and clipping our toenails. It seemed nothing would break the ho-hum spell that had settled upon the town. We sleepwalked through the hours and greeted each other with half-nods and feeble grins. Not even the big fleecy clouds that passed in the blue sky took on the shapes of dragons or pirate ships as they had once upon a time. Just when the stasis became almost intolerable, something happened one night. It wasn’t much, but we clung to it like ants on a twig swept downriver.

  Mildred Johnson was sitting up late reading a new book she’d recently acquired concerning the egg laying habits of yellow hens. Her husband had already gone to bed, as had her daughter, Jessica. The reading wasn’t the most exciting, and she’d dozed off in her chair. Sometime later, she woke very suddenly to the sound of low murmuring coming from her daughter’s room. She got up and went to the half-open door of the bedroom to check that all was fine, but when she peeked in, she saw, in a shaft of moonlight that bathed the scene, something moving on the bed next to Jessica’s pillow. Her first thought was that it was a rat and she screamed. The thing looked up, startled, and in that moment, before it flew out the window, she saw the smooth, fixed, baby-doll expression of Colonel Pudding.

  The parrot’s return and the unusual particulars of the sighting could not exactly be classified as bizarre, but there was enough of an oddness to it to engender a mild titillation of the populace. Where had the bird been hiding since the funeral? What was its midnight message? Was it simply lost and had wandered in the open window or was there some deeper purpose to its actions? These were some of the questions that set off a spark or two in the otherwise dimmed minds of Lipara. As speculation grew, there were more reports of Colonel Pudding visiting the rooms of the town’s sleeping children. It was advised by the Pastor at Sunday mass that all windows of youngsters’ bedrooms be kept closed at night, and the congregation nodded, but just the opposite was practiced, seeing as how parents and children alike all secretly wanted to be involved in the mystery.

  Beyond his night-time visits, the parrot began to be spotted also in broad daylight, flitting here and there just above the roof tops of the town. And one sighting reported that he landed on the left shoulder of Mavis Toth of a Monday afternoon the first week of summer vacation and perched there, yammering into her ear, as she walked from her house out by the lake all the way to the bank. Something was going on, we were sure of it, but what it was no one had the slightest idea. Or I should say, no adults had a clue. The children of Lipara, on the other hand, took to whispering, gathering in groups and talking excitedly until a grownup drew near. Even usual truants of the school year, like the master of spit balls, Alfred Lessert, began spending whole days at the school under the pretense of doing math problems for fun. It was the belief of some that a conspiracy was afoot. Parents slyly tried to coax their children into divulging a morsel of information, but their sons and daughters stared quizzically, either pretending not to know what their folks were getting at or really not knowing. Miss Toth came under scrutiny as well, and instead of really answering questions, she nodded a great deal, played with the chain that held her reading glasses, and forced a laugh when nothing else would do.

  The intrigue surrounding the school house and the town’s children remained of mild interest to the adults throughout the summer, but as always, the important tasks of business and household chores took precedence and finally overwhelmed their attention, so that they did not mark the vanishing of old newspapers and cups of flour. As the first anniversary of the wind’s failure to appear drew closer we tried to pull tight the reins of our speculation as to what would happen that year. In our private minds we all wondered whether the present state of limbo would be split by the gale again howling through town, or if the time would pass without incident and give further proof that the dreaming weirdness had run its course for good, never to return.

  Friday morning of the second-to-last week in August, I went to the mailbox and found only an odd message with no envelope. It was a piece of folded paper, colored green and cut into the shape of a parrot feather. I opened it and read: Colonel Pudding Invites You To The Festival of the Dreaming Wind. The date was the very next day, the time, sundown, and the location, the town square. It went on to announce: Bring only your dreams. I smiled for the first time since the end of the previous summer, and I was so out of practice that the muscles of my face ached slightly. As old and slow as I was, I ran up the path, calling to Lyda. When she saw the invitation, she actually laughed and clapped her hands.

  Late the next day, just before twilight, we left the house and walked to the town square. It was a beautiful evening—pink, orange, and purple in the west where the sun was half-below the horizon. The sky above was dark blue and already the stars were beginning to show themselves. A slight breeze blew, enough to keep the gnats and mosquitoes at home. We held hands and walked in silence. As we passed along, we saw our neighbors leaving their houses and heading in the direction of the festival.

  The town square had been transformed with streamers of gold paper draped upon the picket fences and snaked around the light posts. In the southern corner, rows of folding chairs had been set up facing a slightly raised, make-shift stage that was formed from the wooden pallets the town’s brick makers stacked their wares upon. Two tall poles on either side supported a patchwork curtain comprised of a number of old comforters safety pinned together. Six lit torches had been set up around the performance area, casting a soft glow that became increasingly magical as the sky darkened. Constable Garrett, big cigar in the corner of his mouth, dressed in a colorful muumuu and wearing a bow in his hair, played the usher, making us form a line a short distance from the seating. We complimented him on his outfit, telling him how lovely he looked, and he nodded wearily as usual and answered, “What did you expect?”

  All around the Festival area, Lipara’s children moved busily, with purpose, and in the middle of this bustle of activity stood Miss Toth, her skin blue, her hair a wig of rubber snakes, whispering directions and leaning down to put her ear closer to the ideas and questions of her students. Suddenly all was quiet and still but for the flickering of the torch flames. “Please have your tickets ready,” said Garrett, and he held his hand up and waved us on. Before taking our seats, we were directed to three long tables upon which lay painted papier-mâché masks of animal heads, household items, sea shells, and anything else you could possibly imagine. They had, attached to either side, long strands of thick wire with half-loops at the ends so that you could put on the disguise like a pair of glasses. Mixed in amidst the masks were newspaper hats, and at the end of each table was a stack of fans made of sticks with a round piece of cardboard attached.

  I settled on a mask that made my head a can of beans, and my wife took on the visage of a barnyard chick. Mildred Johnson’s face became a bear paw; her husband’s a bright yellow sun. Beck Harbuth chose a dog mask, and Mayor James Meersch the III turned away from the table a green monkey. Once everyone was something else, we took our fans and went to sit before the stage. The show started promptly. Miss Toth appeared from behind the curtain, carrying a hat rack, which she set down next to her. She welcomed us all and thanked us for coming, introduced Colonel Pudding—creator and founder of the Festival of the Dreaming Wind—and walked off the stage. A moment later, from over our heads, there came the sound of flapping wings, and Colonel Pudding landed on the top of the hat rack. He screeched three times, lifted his wings, bobbed his head twice and said, “Mama, the tale of the dreaming wind. Once upon a time...” before flying away. Jessica Johnson ran out from behind the curtain, whisked the perch off the stage, and the play began.

  The play was about a great wizard who lived, with his wife and daughter, in a castle way up north in the mountains. He was a good wizard, practicing only positive magic, and for anyone who made the arduous journey to see him, he would grant a wish as long as it was meant for someone else. The only two wishes he would not grant were those of riches or power. A chorus of younger children sang songs that filled us in on the details of life upon the mountain. White confetti blew across the stage, becoming snow, to mark the passage of time.

  Then the wizard’s wife, whom he loved very much, caught a chill that progressed into pneumonia. It soon became clear that she was dying, and no matter what spells of enchantment he tried to work, nothing could cure her. When finally she died, he was deeply saddened, as was his daughter. He began to realize that there were things in the world his magic couldn’t control, and he became very protective of his daughter, fearing she would succumb to the same fate as her mother. He had promised his wife that he would always love the girl and keep her safe. This responsibility grew in his mind to overshadow everything, and the least little cut to her finger or scraped knee caused him great anguish.