“Most of the year he wore nothing but shorts, a shirt … but when the winter wind came sweeping up from Antartica with ice in its tongue, licking and smoothing his cheeks into cold flat pebbles, he put on one of his father’s thick coats that came down to his ankles. Then he would turn up the collar, let his hands dangle down to get lost in the huge pockets, and go outside again as snug as a penguin in a burrow. For he couldn’t bear to be inside. He loved the whip of the wind too much, and the salty sting of the spray on his cheek like a slap across the face, and the endless hiss of the dying ripples at his feet.
For Storm-Boy was a storm boy.”
Harper’s middle name is Cloudy, which has something to do with the romance of cowboys and wide western spaces, but reading this last night it occurred to me that maybe it has something to do with a windswept Australian coast too. I think (I know) there is something in me that has always wanted to live someplace sometime we could be less tamed, a little more wild, a little more sunshine-y and stormy.