It’s thirty-nine degrees this morning and there’s a snowdrift by my front door! Actually, it’s a snowy drift of azaleas. It is so beautiful this year that it does, indeed, resemble actual snow.
And, just in case we were getting tired of temperatures in the 70s and touching 80, the Lord sent us a reminder that winter isn’t far behind us. Last night, a storm swept through the southern part of our state but I haven’t heard of any injuries. This morning the sky is clear; doves are calling, robins are shouting it’s gettin’ up time and all is well.
Weather is fascinating, always changing, always affecting our lives in one way or the other. Weather is a large part of the Darcy/Flora Cozy Mysteries. In the first book, The Cemetery Club, it is springtime, May, in fact, as the book opens. We first glimpse Darcy and Flora in an Oklahoma thunderstorm. In the second book of the series, Grave Shift, autumn has caught up with them and, as well as the weather, they have a couple of earthquakes to contend with. Best Left Buried takes place during the winter. Here is only one excerpt that shows how weather is mixed in with solving the mystery in this third cozy:
Sleet rattled against the worn boards of the barn, and a cold wind blew through a crack in the wall directly behind me, sending a shiver down my back. The weather was taking a turn for the worse.
By the way, the current cozy in my computer is Moonlight Can Be Murder, and, you guessed it–there’s something about the moon that seems to affect the people of Ednalee, Oklahoma. The weather? Well, it’s December and a snowy December, at that.
The bumblebees are not confused by that snowy drift beside my door. They know it is a flower, not snow, and they behave accordingly. That beautiful mound of white doesn’t melt; it just welcomes visitors and is a signpost of this brand new season, not of winter, but of spring.
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