It’s cold here. There are mounds of snow and more flakes in the forecast. Icing sugar snow covers the evergreens; we are living in a winter wonderland. Since it’s Christmas, soft, twinkling Christmas lights brighten the long, dark nights. Inside, our halls are decked and bells are jingling and the night before Christmas Eve is anything but silent.
Yet I’m living in the summer.
Late June, to be exact. Have been since April. Lyra’s story is set during the last two weeks of June, at the end of her high school career. It’s always hot where Lyra is.
- It’s an unusually warm spring day in Thorin Hill, a normally temperate northeastern Atlantic coastal town, and the students are impatient to surge outside.
- She feels the rising sun on her back already burning hot at this early hour. The day promises to be a scorcher.
- Annie opens the living room window and lets in a gust of warm, humid air.
- The evening air is breezy, temperate and pleasant.
- She feels a trickle of sweat drip down her back; now that they are stopped, the still air feels stifling.
- An hour later Lyra finds herself at the edge of the water, just down the beach from Annie’s cottage. The sun has risen higher in the gauzy blue sky, but a choppy sea breeze keeps away the heat. It blows Lyra’s long black hair into her face; she thinks of tying it back, but she likes the whip and snap of her hair on her cheek. She turns into the wind, the gust a fresh puff on her cheeks.
How strange to have one metaphorical foot in the heat of the summer and one real one (ok, both real ones) knee deep in thick, cold snowbanks.
The dual life of a writer: a world inside my head and out.
Kinda wish the weather matched up, though.
The hot, sultry, sunny weather, that is.