SuzannePK

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Last night I went to Lakeshore Park after 9:00 p.m. The park is the grounds of a former sanitarium, so its history can prey on your imagination after dark. I do most of my writing sitting atop a modern river mound there. It looks like an Indian mound, if the Native Americans had bulldozers and a pressing need to move the dirt generated from leveling the 4th Creek floodplain for a baseball complex. The mound is a great bowl with its back facing the river, and it is about three stories high.
In the fall, the changing temperatures lead to vastly different air masses coming in from the river. Cold fingers of air will suddenly grip you as they drift in over the mound. At other times, you will be jogging down the path and suddenly you run right into a warm sphere, a pocket of air at 98.6 F, roughly person-shaped. It’s like getting turned inside out by a hug.
The owls call across the park and river to one another, but last night there was something else calling down by the 4th Creek. The other night, as we approached the 4th Creek trail, there was a scream from the creek bank that sounded like a cross between a war cry and a woman giving birth. I am not sure that I have crossed the soccer field that quickly since I was in my 20s. That was the cold fingers version of the park.
Tonight it is the warm sphere incarnation. On that same stretch of creek-bounded soccer field, a large family is playing soccer. There are no lights for the field, so they have all pulled their cars along it and are playing by the light from their collective headlights.
This contrast is what makes the park such a good place to think of the plot for a novel. The spooky and safe coexisting. Fertile grounds.

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