Summer Redux

Bonus Beach Day
As I bemoaned in my latest blog entry, pools have been closed for a month. But thanks to either global warming or plain dumb luck, here in the Land of the Great Lakes we just enjoyed the warmest Columbus Day in memory. Can you say, "Ninety degrees in October"?! Almost never at this latitude.

I shot the above photo at Maumee Bay State Park in northwestern Ohio yesterday and the photo below in Oakland County, Michigan, the day before. Oh yeah, when it comes to water and sunshine, I get around. And I haul my camera. I also put on my swimsuit and dive in, a la Whiskey Mattimoe. Note: the water was not quite too cold for swimming, although nobody stayed in for more than a few minutes. Long enough to say we did it!

How Whiskey would love this weather, if only she had the time (and organizational skills) to step away from her busy real estate practice and chaotic home life to enjoy the great outdoors. My fictional mystery heroine just gets in trouble when she's out in nature. In Whiskey and Tonic, she finds death on a jinxed woodland property; in Whiskey Straight Up, it's an ice-fishing competition gone deadly wrong; in Whiskey on the Rocks, it's leaf-peeping with evil leaf-peepers. And in the forthcoming Whiskey and Water, Whiskey will confront a rip tide.

But let the record show that for a few brief moments in my own very real life, I swam in a clear, cold Northern lake even as the red leaves dropped from the trees....