Balcony

She looks out from her balcony and sees the sun-bleached buildings - mostly white - climbing back up the hillside, crowded together seemingly without reason or order. She thinks about the buildings back home, dark, drab, damp with rain and cold. She sighs.

She had always thought of herself as a summer person, bursting into bloom whenever the sun warmed her skin. Now, to her surprise, she found herself nostalgic for the shiver when she crawled reluctantly out of bed on a dark, cold, wet and windy February morning. A time when it seemed as though summer, or even ordinary sunshine, would never be seen again. She could now understand those ancient pagan rituals that begged for the return of spring at such times, and why the early Christians had been so eager to appropriate them.