The End of May

Summer starts to push in fast at the end of May.  The Indianapolis 500 is over, the roar on 16th Street just an echo now, the blimps off to a new destination, the circuit continuing on in its perpetual left turn until a new champion is named--and then it's time to start all over.  Memorial Day stops us, sends us to the cemeteries with brooms, clippers, and plastic bouquets, to remember, pause, clean, and move on with our lives, promising to return for the flowers so they aren't thrown away, but sometimes we don't.  We just leave them to be removed, placed in a mound somewhere that never rots.

I like summer, but I am not wholly enamored by it, though at times it can be as peaceful and offer a dash of solitude, just as winter can, only with birdsong and insects buzzing about.  There is more business to tend to in the summer than there usually is in winter.  But I like the seasons, and since Indiana has been my home for most of my life, I think I have become numbed more to their changing than is to my liking.  The flowers take work now, watering, pruning, feeding.  The first bloom of the first rose of the season is just starting to show itself, and the aphids have found a new home.  There will be many more blooms, if we're lucky, blooms all the way to the first frost, which looms in the distance.

May has been a busy month.  It saw the release of my sixth Josiah Wolfe novel, The Gila Wars, and it may well be the very last one that I write in that series.  I thought I knew how I felt about that, but I'm not so sure now.  Writing Josiah was difficult, because he lived in difficult times, and was more complex because of it.  I learned so much from writing those books, I'm not sure that I can process it all just yet.  I think I will be discovering those lessons for a long time to come, with each new book I write--if I am lucky enough to do so.

So, summer is upon us.  Relax, slow down, get some sun, have an adventure, laugh, and live.  I'm writing a new book, a new series, and it's due in October.  Just when the air starts to chill, and the furnace will need tuned up, the leaves raked, the rose bushes cut back.  Frost will become a reality and not a promise, and another beginning and end in will be in the air.