Getting Through

Are you hanging on by your last frayed nerve as you slog through the dregs of winter? I know it well: the March vagaries of a couple of days in the sixties that bring daffodil shoots above ground reaching for the sun, teenagers in shorts and T shirts flocking like birds, kids wobbling around on Christmas bikes, happy dogs taking their humans on long walks. Fooled again, suckers that we all are, the next day or the next week, of course, comes another “winter storm,” with sleet, sub-freezing temperatures, another round of mud tracked through the house, another round of “What did I do with my gloves?” We’re all irritated by weather whiplash.

The pool

Since we both can work remotely, my husband and I decided seven years ago that we could outsmart winter. We’d go to Florida for six to eight weeks and work there. He has close family that moved south when they retired to escape the spirit-killing brutal and/or gray winters in New England and the Pacific northwest, and they’d picked a lovely smallish city south of Sarasota right on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. (Yes, that’s what I meant to say.) So we tough it out until the end of January at home, and then move down here where we rent the same house every year until mid-March, annually lying to each other that winter will be over when we get home. While we’re here we relish the chance to work in a beautiful lanai with a heated pool for swimming every afternoon and seeing family regularly. As I write this, it’s 80 degrees. We try to tempt a daughter or granddaughter to come down with or without her family for as long as she might like and love it when we’re successful.

Gopher tortoise friend

Cassie thinks being here is as good as stealing a whole box of treats off the counter every damn day. She can go in and out of the house into a fenced yard whenever she wants. No mud, no one stopping her and wiping her feet twenty times a day. Mourning doves call her outside where there are little lizards to hunt in the yard, not that she’d have a clue what to do if she caught one, but their trails are so enticing. She gets looong walks in the sunshine, sees lots of gopher tortoises and egrets, runs to retrieve her tennis ball near the water.

Lizard hunting in the yard

What the catch? It’s one hundred percent a first world thing to even mention, but it’s made me think of those of you who’ve not had the privilege of missing much of winter’s worst. (Weather, I mean. I know of no way to miss the painful, scary dumfuckery happening in America.) Regarding weather, though: this week it’s going to be in the sixties all week at home. By the time we leave, the following week? It will be back in the thirties and low forties. I suspect that, as during January’s heavy snows, there will be frustration to share with our friends for another month or so when we get back home. And Cassie will be truly pissed off that we don’t just stay where we are now. She’ll say: “Hey, you can be upset about the dumfuckery from anywhere, you know, make calls and write letters from anywhere. So do it.” (Casssie talks a lot.)

Myakka State Park

I’ve been working steadily on a new manuscript, I’m glad to be able to say, and as you might remember, am also now gearing up for the April 22, launch of MOTHERS OF FATE. I’m really happy that early reviews have been so good, and I’ve just been notified that the novel will featured in the April 19th edition of FRESH FICTION, which is especially terrific. I wouldn’t be doing the obnoxious part of my job if I didn’t mention how important preorders are to the success of a book, so please consider it–anywhere good books are sold! Here’s an offer: if you order a copy for yourself and/or anyone else and you’d like a personalized signed bookplate, just contact me by email (Lynne@LynneHugo.com). All I’ll need is the details of what you’d like on it (them) and where you’d like it mailed and I’m happy to do this absolutely free.

While we’re still here, I thought I’d share some pictures of our winter home away from home. So please tell me, what’s winter like been like where you are? And here’s the most important question: what engrossing book have you read this winter. Will you recommend it to us? (I read and respond to every comment!)