Gosh is that the time? It's several hours past October already - where has the time gone!
One minute we were shivering our way through April, adjusting to the temperatures of the Northern Hemisphere, trying to remember what sort of clothes and footwear we should be wearing. The next, it seems, we are shivering our way into winter.
I'm sure we had a summer. I do recall long days of sunshine and impossibly turquoise waters, sandy beaches and deserted coves. I think I looked at the light blue sky on more than one occasion and felt choked with happiness. I listened to chiff chaffs as I pegged out the washing, heard the owls laughing in the night behind the house. I felt dappled sunshine on my face as I sat over coffee in the garden.
And yet it was all so fleeting.
Someone once said (there's always someone) that the price we pay for living in and loving a foreign country is to be eternally nostalgic and while I don't exactly miss the kamakaze driving of Colombo's roads, nor the arrogant ignorance of Sri Lanka's ruling classes, I guess I am homesick for some wall to wall sunshine and the forever promise of warmth and blue skies.
I watch the trees around us, scrutinising their foliage for signs of rusty decay. My heart sinks as the green slips away, the canopy thins just as the traffic has. Sound travels more; there is an echoing along the road. The sand on the beaches is frothed from the raindrops and it is hard to remember these lonely stretches of shoreline were so very recently heaving with bright pink flesh, heady with the scent of a thousand bottles of suntan lotion.
Just as I mourn the turning of the tide, watching the water swirl back out of our lovely little bay, I am trying to be brave in the face of the oncoming winter.
But it doesn't seem right to me. Only two short months of summer and we are back with the heating on. Time to dig out the socks and throw another quilt on the bed.
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