43. Summer is Coming

The next I received an ad from a company selling outdoor gear.  The photo showed a young couple fishing from a boat, sunlight reflecting off the water. He was shirtless and wearing flip-flops.  Barefoot and smiling for the camera, she wore a t-shirt and bikini bottoms. I sat in my office, still huddled in my coat, cold from the short walk from my car to the building entrance. Slush in my shoe had numbed half my left foot. A blizzard was expected to blanket the region over the weekend.

‘Summer is coming,’ the happy voice in my head said.  I looked out the window. ‘In five months,’ a less cheerful voice answered. “But it is coming,” I said out loud. 

When I first got sober, I annoyed everyone by asking daily when better times were coming. People told me to be patient.  I stifled the urge to strangle them.  Until, one day, like summer, better times arrived.

Today I will remember summer is coming.

Sober Not Somber © 2015 by Ken Montrose

(Just a reminder: Sober Not Somber is a work of fiction.  Any resemblance to anyone you might know is purely coincidental.)