Jan Karon says that weather is a writer’s friend. Here is how she put it: “I find weather one of the most useful tools ever made available to an author, not to mention poets, whose work absolutely thrives on it. The Mitford novels are full of weather, and would be intolerably weak tea without it.”
If you would like to read a wonderful little cluster of weather descriptions invest in The Mitford Bedside Companion. It is a treasure if you only buy it for this delightful chapter.
In our part of the world I think we are all longing for any sign of spring but this morning it is eleven below zero. Letting Hazard out to take care of his necessaries It’s hard to imagine a balmy summer evening out on the porch in the rocker reading and sipping tea and chatting up the neighbors but sure as sunrise and birdsong in a couple months it will be mid-April. By then the earth will travel around the sun far enough that the northern hemisphere will lean into warmth, the birds will sing, the crocuses will surface from the cold earth pushing through the snow, the daffodils will bloom, the forsythia will burst into yellow flower, the Dogwoods will blossom, the grass will green, and we will all dress up and fill the church to celebrate our ever-living Lord.
I shouldn’t write too much about this right now because where we live it will still be three months until I can safely leave my jackets or sweaters at home and walk along the Lower Huron River or along Lake Erie in shirt sleeves with the sun shining wonderfully on my neck. They say that hope springs eternal in the human breast. The older I get the more I long for the day we can slide open the windows and smell the fresh earth on the breeze through the screens and take an evening drive with the windows down.
is this book in
long hand too…. remember “A Continual Feast”