Fall’s True Nature

I sit drinking coffee at the local Starbucks. The sky is still dark, lit with street lights and the festive bulbs of Starbucks’ patio. I don’t know what to write on this gloomy morning.

Yesterday it rained. The remnants sit in puddles in the parking lot. Autumn rains have a special place in my mind, indelibly printed there by a friend who took me out walking in the rain.

I have found Fall, not in the perfect blue of a sky, but in rain, in being drenched on a walk through a chilly night.

(In a dream: I walk through the storm. I am the storm. My voice is lost in thunder, and that is as it should be, because I will go back to the world of order where I am sixty and thought to be tame.)

It will be sunny today. It will be placid. I will smile at the sun and be mild, but I know my true nature. I know Fall’s true nature.

A Hole in the Clouds

Out the window, the clouds move away after spilling the gentlest of rain on us. In the clouds, blue-purple and grey, the slightest glimpse of light spills through. This is my mood, perfectly. My life has been grey lately, neither full of exuberant life nor beset by torrents. One day follows another and I do the same thing day after day, more or less. This is not a bad thing.

I worry more about the exuberant than the torrential. I weather storms well and have done all my life. Bright sunshine has its own violence, smashing calm just as much as lightning does. Great happiness tempts its opposite more than great depression does.

I want a little light peeking through my clouds, a bubble of joy, not the torrent that tells me that life is out of control. Because the latter is mania, and it scares me more than depression.

Here’s for a calm day.

Weather and the Writer

I’m sitting by the window at Starbucks. My husband sits across from me, finishing his first screenplay, based on my first Christmas novel. The Kringle Conspiracy has sold a few copies, and I have distributed free copies to almost 5000 people on BookFunnel in exchange for registration on my mailing list.

It looks like it wants to rain out. It rained earlier, but we could use more rain. I could use more rain, wind, and petrichor to remind me that summer will be over soon. I talk about the weather a lot, because the weather always surrounds us and engages our senses.

Writers use weather to inform their scenes, but not always in the way we expect. Do happily ever afters always happen under sunny skies with rainbows? I can see scenarios where the last scene, the big kiss, happens in the pouring rain, or in a snowstorm. Each of those would communicate two different feels — the pouring rain might be tempestuous or cathartic, the snowstorm cozy or threatening. A battle in a torrential rainstorm would be grueling, but on a sunny day, be ironic.

I want you to take a moment and imagine some weather, either some that you love or some you hate. Then tell a story about what happens in that weather, describing the air, the sky, the precipitation (if any). Make the scene about the weather and what happens in this weather. Write it down.

Photo by Ralph W. lambrecht on Pexels.com

You are now a writer!