Last week we had temperatures in the eighties; this morning it is snowing....
The action of my second novel, Trespasser, takes place in this week of the year, and the recent weather made me rememeber something I wrote about the season:
Late March. Mud season in Maine. Not yet springtime but no longer winter either—a slippery, seasonal limbo. Weather even more freakish than usual. Rain, snow, ice, and sun, all within the span of an hour. A meteorologist's worst nightmare.
The only constant is mud. Mud creeping up your boots, splattering your pant legs, finding its way onto clothes you never even wear outdoors. Your fingernails jammed black with it. The impossibility of ever feeling clean. The inside of your truck transformed each day into a pigpen. Mud splashed onto the windshield, then smeared back and forth by the wipers. The wheels gummed up with mire and packed with gravel into the axles. Every car on the road painted the same shit brown.
Wherever you look a mottled, melting landscape. Snow banks rotting along the roadsides and melt-water streams the color of urine. Everything that was hidden is now exposed. Beer cans, trash bags, emptied ashtrays. Fur and feathers from creatures unidentifiable, things long dead.
Winter's aftermath. The dirtiest season.
Freakish, indeed.
PS. The paperback for Trespasser hits stores on April 10.