Spring, Summer, Winter and Fall

Seasons of the year can give you some variety in weather. I like living in a place where each season has its time. Here in Kentucky, sometimes a bit of one season can sneak into a different season. Actually, it’s a pretty good chance that will happen, especially in the spring and fall. We can think we’ve left winter behind when Old Man Winter will let us know he is still around with some cold winds. Then again, Mother Nature can sometimes drop a beautiful day of sunshine and unseasonable warmth down in the middle of February.

However, generally we can depend on July and August being summer. That means hot and often dry except for a thunderstorm dashing in. Sometimes when your grass is turning brown and your garden looks ready to throw in the towel, thunder sounding in the distance makes you want to go out and lasso the cloud to pull it nearer. Then again, if you’ve had plenty of rain and you have an outdoor event planned, you want to get a giant fan to blow it off in some other direction. But weather does what it wants.

You can depend on January and February being winter too. In spite of that gift of a warmer day now and again, cold sticks around. I did give Tansy that gift of a nicer day to go riding in Along a Storied Trail. She needed a day to enjoy blue skies and sunshine. I had her making her book rounds in the snow and ice often enough. The poor girl’s fingers were surely half frozen when she got home on some of those days.

Weather is often important in my stories. Sometimes a storm sweeps down the way it did in Scent of Lilacs. In Angel Sister, the hot dry summer might have made you thirsty while you were reading. Francine in The Healing Hills went through several seasons as she rode up in the hills to practice her midwifery skills. She rode through thunderstorms, rain, and even delivered a baby in the middle of an icy snowstorm. Piper had some thunderstorm adventures too in her summer as a courier with the Frontier Nursing Service in An Appalachian Summer.

While the weather doesn’t storm or parch or flood in every story I’ve written, it’s always there, a part of my characters’ days. We are interested in the weather now, but it doesn’t take much imagination to know how much more the weather affected the lives of people when they were growing their own food in gardens or sass patches as the mountain people called their gardens. Gathering food was a big part of a person daily life. People couldn’t hop down to the grocery to get whatever they wanted to eat. In the frontier days and even later, they had to grow what they needed or hunt for their meat.

Every time I pass the persimmon tree here on my farm I think that while I’m not excited about eating the persimmons or the pawpaws on the pawpaw tree either, the pioneers probably loved having a persimmon or pawpaw tree close by.  Fruit for them. Something they could have to add sweetness and difference to their diets. So weather was important to them. They needed the rain to make things grow. They hoped for no late frosts to kill the fruit tree blooms.

I try to remember all that when I’m writing my stories here in my office that’s heated in the winter and cooled in the summer. But I’ve lived in those drafty houses that stayed chilly in the winter and hot in the summer. I’ve raised plenty of gardens and canned the produce. I know about some of the things I have my characters doing in summer, winter, spring and fall. But I can’t say I’ve ever ridden a horse through a rainstorm the way Piper did in An Appalachian Summer or rode along an icy path up into the hills carrying books to readers like my packhorse librarian, Tansy, in Along a Storied Trail. But I can imagine it since I have seen the rain and the snow.

Do you think weather is important in stories? Do you like knowing the weather when you’re reading those stories?