Hi Everyone – I know I’m behind and I know I desperately need to announce winners. [Um … anyone wanna take over that task?] But – today we have Kira Brady visiting with us! Yay! [Sorry for not more enthusiasm and intro – I’m kinda tapped out. Kira is adorable and pretty awesome though.]
Some like it wet.
In Seattle, we joke that Alaskans have forty words for snow, but we have forty words for rain. Read the weather forecast and you just might believe it: cloudy with rain, mostly cloudy with showers, rain tapering to showers, clouds limiting sun with frequent showers, periods of rain showers, heavy rain, light rain with afternoon sunbreaks. What’s a “sunbreak” you ask? It’s that brief moment of glory when the clouds part and a shaft of glimmering, golden sunlight spills through to light our world. Seattleittes live in hope of those sunbreaks. Day after gloomy day, we wait in perpetual faith that we will get that one moment of zen. And when it hits, illuminating the surrounding mountains, shimmering off the water, and casting the world in lighter shade of pale, it makes all the time spent in the gloom worth it.
August, alone, is a month of sunbreaks. It’s like a hot love affair after a long, lonely drought. We have sunny day after sunny day. For the other eleven rainy months, all we have is hope. We live in faith that August will come, just as we know that somewhere behind that thick wall of clouds, the sun still shines.
Seattle weather is a great romance: It starts off in the doldrums; the heroine and hero are in a Bad Place. They meet. Things go from bad to worse. There are sparks (sunbreaks!). May or June tease with the possibility that they might carry summer on their winds, but the clouds and the bad guys close in. Toward the end of July, it seems like all hope is lost for our hero and heroine. They start to believe they’ve been transported to Ray Bradbury’s Venus, where the sun is only seen for two hours once every five years. This is not that year.
And then like a thunderbolt from the heavens, August comes roaring in. Hot, raging sun all day long. Our hero and heroine remember what it is to be too warm. They realize perhaps they might survive the rainy season if they team up. Together, they might occupy themselves inside, away from the damp, warming each other up and watching in hope of that rare, perfect moment: sunbreak.
Seattle in the Deadglass Trilogy is its own character: wet, insidious, and seductive. I had a great time writing about it, in part because I do love the city, rain and all. While I love my sunbreaks, August finds me running for the shade. What’s your favorite time of year? Do you like the sound of rain on a hot tin roof? Or do you prefer the caress of sun day in and day out?