That’s sure what it feels like. It might well go up to 70 degrees here this weekend.
Maybe the folks who can actually do something about the ultimate problems will finally get the message.
Personally, I have this general feeling that the whole of existence is just out of sync, not just the weather. I can’t seem to get into a lot of the things that I’ve always enjoyed. Reading, for example.
I’ve always been a voracious reader. Fiction, mostly. Fiction with kick-ass female protagonists, mostly. These days, instead of actually reading, I take the lazy way out and download audio books from my public library and listen to them as I’m lying in bed, trying to fall asleep. The problem is that the library’s selection leaves much to be desired.
I don’t like the kinds of romance novels that writers like Nora Roberts produce. The library has lots of them. However, Nora Roberts writing as J.D. Robb turns out a series of unqiue sci-fi/romance stories with a great female main character — Eve Dallas, a cop in the next century. The library has a few of those. They also have one of the novels by forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs. Her series with Temperance Brennan as the main character is the basis for the current Fox television series, Bones. But I’ve already read that one in real book format.
So, the other day I downloaded a series of short stories by Elizabeth Berg. In my days of actual reading, I had consumed several of her novels, my favorites being The Art of Mending. and Talk Before Sleep.
All of Berg’s novels wrestle with the contradictions that suffuse the lives of “ordinary” women. Yet, her characters emerge as truly extraordinary in the management of the details of their lives and their relationships. The short stories to which I am listening these nights include a vignette about a woman whose mother is developing dementia and how the two of them deal with it. It’s told by the woman and shifts between her memories of mother of her childhood and the mother she now has. Obviously, it hit home.
The other stories are just as relevant. I like reading about women who muse, women who amuse, women who love and hate and wonder and know how to kick ass. Women whose living is infused with introspection and honesty.
Occasionally I can get into a male writer. I read all of Dan Brown’s novels — for their subject matter as well as for the roller-coaster writing. I have even enjoyed listening to a couple of Dean Koontz’s eerie tales.
But tonight it’s back to Berg.
I miss my women friends.