Seasonal disorder

Seasonal disorder

Summers used to be different. There had always been rain in the summer. But not this much rain. Alice looked at the sheet of water flowing down the window. Beyond it the world was grey and hard to see. There’d be no going outside for quite some time. With a heavy sigh she returned to her desk. She switched on the projector module with a light tap and waited for the screen and keyboard to appear in front of her. 

Her fingers moved swiftly across the lighted patches as she logged in to the digital office and her social accounts. Messages popped up on the wall projection but Alice couldn’t bring herself to open them. It had only been two weeks since the rain had isolated everyone and already it felt like forever.

A heavy cloud hung in her mind and she could not get it to move on. A cold had crept inside her bones and no matter how many sweaters she wore, she could not get warm again. ‘What am I doing? I can’t be here’, she thought. Hugging herself she got up and went back to bed to hide under the covers.

Spring mostly meant hay fever to Heather. Having tried all the regular and not so regular medication available, she was left sneezing in the morning and nursing a headache in the evening. How could pollen cause this much trouble for a person? It can’t have always been like this, people in the olden days would’ve gone mad working the fields in this condition. She blew her nose and wiped the tears from her stinging eyes before finishing her report.

There, she deserved some chocolate now. It might not be healthy to eat this much candy but the strong flavours were the only ones she could taste throughout this season. Everything else turned to cardboard on her tongue. She opened her drawer and picked a bar, dark chocolate with raspberry cream filling. As it melted in her mouth she felt that this was the only way to make it till fall.

Alicia liked fall best of all. It was the cold morning air giving way to warm middays that turned into crisp evenings that made it so special. Alicia liked nothing so much as change and fall was all about change. She put a leash on her Labrador Rubia and got on her bike. Together they would race through the forest stirring the leaves that had fallen to meet with the leaves that were dropping.

She imagined them greeting each other as old friends whenever they met in the midst of rising and falling. Their trail perpetually followed by a happy chorus of leafy voices. When they reached the sandy dunes she called Rubia to heel. She left her bike leaning against a pine tree and rolled up Rubia’s leash. Already she had seen a place where she could lie down to stare at the sky as if nothing else mattered.

Winter was a world of hurt in which she lost herself and had trouble finding her way back. The snow cutting her off from the company of friends and family did nothing to help. Felicity pulled out all the stops to help her fight the looming depression but it was hard to struggle against your own mind. It required a full array including a timed light that woke her up in the morning; light therapy glasses she wore for twenty minutes for at least ten days; a steady supply of bananas for their tryptophan levels; a daily walk of twenty minutes and regular physical contact with friends and family.

Snow had been tampering with the last two requirements on her list making it difficult to succeed. What the world really needed was a way to virtually hug the people you couldn’t get to. That or a proper teleportation device that would not be thwarted by the weather. But since these things did not exist, she sat down behind her computer and wrote a story of a world in which they did. 

Hurricane season did not affect the island as much as it did some of the others. Most hurricanes merely pretended to move towards the island only to veer off and wreak havoc to the north. Tropical storms on the other hand were a yearly occurrence as some of the hurricanes were a bit late in veering off. Today seemed to be one of those days with a hurricane lingering in a spot where it could go either way.

The radio had ceased playing songs in favour of a heated debate between the DJ and various callers on whether or not people should be preparing for a tropical storm. Some callers felt the costs would be greater than the damage. Others were rather safe than sorry. A third group suspected it would just rain throughout the night and clear up in the morning. Tamara looked at her aunt to see which side she would take.

Her aunt frowned and said: “If I wash those clothes now do you think we can take them down before the rain starts? I really don’t want to put this off till tomorrow.” “I don’t know, shouldn’t we be preparing for the storm?” “People talk about the storm like it never rained before. It’s gonna break the roads and mess up some beaches. Just remember to steer clear of them potholes when you go out tomorrow morning.” Tamara was still wondering how her aunt could be so calm when she heard the first soothing sounds of the rain.