Julian Umland
June 26, 2014 7:21 AM
Enjoying spring. by Julian Umland
After uneventful days back at school had turned first into uneventful weeks and then uneventful months, Julian stopped really thinking about the events of the fall much at all, but she still tipped her face up toward the sky any time she went outside and the sun was shining. That, she thought, had been almost the worst part of everything, how gloomy everything had been when the whole world had seemed permanently encased in unchanging purple clouds which blocked out all the softer light the sun had to offer.Clouds, she had heard over midterm, didn’t really block out the sun, just the parts of it that weren’t as likely to give people cancer, and maybe even make the parts that did worse. Sometimes, Julian thought it would be easier to look for the silver linings of things and pick out corny inspirational sayings, maybe something about always having the sun even when they didn’t realize they did, if she had a slightly less educated family, or at least one with more members who didn’t have a habit of being dreadfully matter-of-fact sometimes. Still, though, she didn’t think there was too much danger; she hadn’t spent much time outdoors during the fall because the looks of the grounds had creeped her out, and she was sure she wasn’t the only one. If she got skin cancer at school (not something she'd ever really dwelt on before, but apparently, at least half of her biological family did not run to good health, a thought she pushed aside more quickly than those of the clouds) she thought she was more likely to lay the foundation now than for it to happen because of the clouds. She had never been the most outdoorsy person alive, but Sonora was beautiful in the spring, and after first the oppressive gloom and then a snowy winter, the light and greenery were very appealing.
For a few minutes, then, she just enjoyed them, walking along the paths with her bag swinging loosely, its bottom very close to the ground, from her hand until she found an open space which appealed to her and had a place where she could sit to do some reading.
Opening her bag, she went through the options. Charms…Potions…Transfiguration textbooks, a novel, a couple of books her mother wanted her to read, letters from home…she flipped through those quickly, Stephen’s short, cheery notes punctuated by Joe’s crayon signature and Paul’s even shorter footnotes, John badgering her to mutilate the hedges so he could satisfy his latest mania, which was evidently botanical in nature, Mom’s flowing script commenting on her interpretations of the gospel of Luke and filling her in on everyday life back home, and one other. She put them all away again for now in favor of the novel. It was too pretty a day to do her class reading; she’d rather continue with the adventures of the Muggleborn witch who, after her brothers joined the army, used her talents to become a superspy in France during World War II. It was mostly fluff, but some of the descriptive passages were startlingly good, seeming almost to come from out of nowhere in the midst of the mediocre dialogue.
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Julian Umland
Enjoying spring.
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