Tuesday, June 17
Sauna house, Sundö, 14:00
I woke up from a deep sleep at 8:00 to realise three things. The room felt very cold. The howling wind outside made it impossible to think. A mosquito had bitten an extremely unlikely part of my body in the night. None of these made me especially happy.
Naa was also deep asleep and I woke her up after I had washed. Trees were bending and the sound of thousands of leaves rustling frightened the cat. It refused to go out and when it finally did it howled to come back in a few minutes later. We ate breakfast feeling as though it would soon be Christmas.
After Naa had left for work I moved to the sauna house to begin writing. I had to return for extra clothing and ended up wearing a hoodie, thick woollen winter socks, a cushion to put my feet on, and I still felt cold. I was glad to stop when Naa came back for her morning break at 10:45. We had a pot of tea, Naa had several sandwiches, and I warmed up a bit.
This week I have started using Scrivener again and I am finding it very useful. Last year when I bought it I couldn’t get the hang of it. I seem to have learned how to use it by switching to Liquid Story Binder, and then transferring the principles back. Reading the manual from cover to cover last week on the bus probably didn’t hurt either.
Now I am in the sauna house. Sunshine has been out but has just been outside the door howling at me. I opened the door and it looked at me in the way it does when it wants to go somewhere. I ran over to the house and it raced alongside me. I let it in and it immediately leapt on the bed and wouldn’t move. Now I am back and before I close the door I look out and see Naa and one of the other two teenage girls working in the fields weeding. All I can see of them are their red and blue jackets, as they kneel or bend down.
The sky is a uniform gray. In a few moments it will start drizzling.
I will continue to work on the thesis until 15:15 when it will start raining very heavily, and Naa will arrive home. We will both sit in the sauna house for a few minutes talking about how cold it is, before Naa goes to do the washing up and I go to begin making dinner. I will be glad to get into the relative warmth again. I will realise how the cold has affected me in terms of concentration and speed of writing. I will bet that there are more books written near the equator than inside the Arctic Circle.
Before I close the laptop I will look at the window and realise that the particularly noisy rain is, in fact, a full-blown hailstorm. Now that’s what I call summer.