The worlds within and beside

Yesterday I took a walk through a rambling sculpture park set amidst the green hills of West Yorkshire.

The wind howled and icy raindrops stung my face, my body; invigorating, cleansing. I was with my father and his wife, Angela, and her two dogs. We walked up a hill and looked back across the late-autumn landscape of fields, trees turned crimson and golden, and a grand Georgian manor in a valley below. Bretton Hall.

Interspersed among the sheep, hedges, stone walls and duck ponds were sculptures, mainly by Yorkshire-born Roger Moore. Half men, half rabbits. Rodin-esque thinkers, nude, their wind-battered private parts looking shriveled in the November wind.

I learned from my sister that this day she, too, was in a sculpture park, in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art, in New York. She was with my mother, and my mother's companion and erstwile man-friend, Michael. Perhaps they were also looking at Roger Moores.

Strange parallels.

As I lay in bed later that night, in the drafty attic of my step-mother's Victorian house, I could hear the wind shaking and rattling past the roof, whistling eerily. Sheets of rain would drum the skylight above my bed in an unyieldy percussion, then stop. I would look up, and see clouds racing angrily across the sky, then see patches of stars.

The same jet stream that is the river that circles the world, that brings weather everywhere. Those same fierce winds were blowing over my sister's head in New York only hours, or perhaps a few days, before. All shifts east, following the current of pressure, waves.

We live our world within and beside the others.