And the Living is Easy

I don’t much like summer -- it’s too cold. Indoors, that is. Movie theaters and grocery stores really push down on the thermostat, often to the point where I wish I’d brought a sweater along. But my husband likes it really cool, too, in our apartment. Half the reason I take a nice, hot shower every day is to get warm.

One reason to like summer, on the other hand, is that travel is much easier. No icy roads, no nightfall at five o’clock. So it’s not all bad.

My routine doesn’t much change in the summer. I only rarely make needlework items as Christmas gifts -- my eyes are approaching a stage where I will need cataract surgery one of these days, and so my projects are aimed more learning how a particular form of needlework is done than doing it well, and the result is often not good enough to give as a gift. Well, with one hoped-for exception: I took a class on making Romanian Point Lace in Salt Lake City last month, and I bought a kit to make a Christmas present of it for the woman who bravely and gamely came with me on my Great Train Journey. Nine stops in nineteen days, whew!

I think most crafters ply their craft “out of season.” If you’re going to stitch a Christmas stocking for a grandchild, you must start it long, long before the stores put out their Christmas stuff -- in, say, May or June. (At the rate I work, it would be ready not by this Christmas, but the next!)

My writing routine is basic: sit in the chair, boot up, and write. So the weather outdoors doesn’t affect that part of it. My office doesn’t even have a window, which makes it easier to write a snowstorm into a book in July. But see paragraph two, above, for the part about traveling to interview someone or look at something as research.

Like many other people, my favorite season is autumn; that’s when the flowery promise of spring is kept. I seem to have more energy in the fall, and my outlook is optimistic for some reason. How about you?