Spring... Sort of

It will officially be spring later today and we here in the northeast are eagerly anticipating flowers and warmer weather, in place of the snow that is supposed to begin any minute. Snowdrops (pictured above) have been blooming here for a while now, and the generous sweep of daffodils beneath my kitchen window started sprouting while temperatures were still in single digits, with flower buds appearing this week. Cheerful, bright yellow forsythia can't be far behind.

At the same time that I pine a little for warmth and flowers, I realize that in a very short while, we'll all be complaining about the heat and looking forward to the cooler days of autumn and "sweater weather." In truth, it doesn't seem like we get all that much sweater weather here, but that we just alternate between coat-and-muffler weather and shorts-and-t-shirt weather, with but a few transitional "sweater days" in between.

The weather has been a "safe" and interesting conversation-starter for untold generations, hasn't it? For many of our ancestors, those who came from temperate climates, weather was a critical element in their lives. Most people farmed back a couple centuries ago, and changes in the weather, even just a particularly bad storm or long stretch of dry weather, could cause famine, disease, and death. It seems unimaginable now, doesn't it? Many of my students come from more tropical climates, and they don't seem to have our cultural habit of talking about the weather all the time. They mostly complain when it's very cold, something someone from Cuba, say, has a hard time getting used to.

During the most recent cold spell, I've been reading mystery novels set in the American southwest, enjoying descriptions of hot dry desert winds and people perspiring a lot. My reading so far has included Spider Woman's Daughter, by Anne Hillerman, and A Thief of Time, by her father, the late, great author dTony Hillerman. If you love the Colorado Plateau area of Arizona, Utah, New Mexico and Colorado, or think you might, or if you just like well-crafted mystery novels, I can recommend these. By the way, do read A A Thief of Time first, because Anne Hillerman's Spider Woman's Daughter  takes up the storyline, many years later, in A Thief of Time. I read them in reverse order because Anne Hillerman's book is the monthly selection for my detective story book group at the library. If you have access to Overdrive, which is the free e-book lending service many libraries provide for their patrons, both books are available there plus a lot more of Tony Hillerman's.

Reading really is a great way to "get away," isn't it? In the depth of the summer heat you can read stories set in the far north, and almost feel the icy chill. I can recommend Dana Stabenow's Kate Shugak mystery series, starting with A Cold Day for Murder. These are also well-written, entertaining mysteries set in an Alaskan national park. And the sense of place is as well done by
Stabenow for the Alaskan wilderness as it is by the Hillermans for the Four Corners area desert. Save Stabenow for deep summer, though. Almost as good as air conditioning.