We have a ready answer in Florida when asked what is the hottest summer month.

It’s September.

Yeah, I know. You probably don’t think of September as a summer month, what with the (outdated) ban on wearing white after Labor Day, back-to-school worries, and the fact that September means that Halloween, Thanksgiving, and the holiday season aren’t far behind.

But for us Floridians, September can be as hot as any summer month.

I am sure that no one wants to repeat the bitter cold that seemed to go on forever last winter. While we didn’t have that in Florida, I never gloat about the weather. Anything can happen and make the weather in Florida miserable.

But winter is coming, whether we like it or not. And two recent novels sum up winter in ways that make us want to take note.

Carrie La Seur sets her debut novel The Home Place (Wm. Morrow) in Montana, a place where the cold can reach unfathomable dimensions. Her description of the cold winter is sheer poetry:

“The cold on a January night in Billings, Montana is personal and spiritual.  It knows your weaknesses. It communicates with your fears. If you have a god, this cold pulls a veil between you and your deity. It gets you alone in a place where it can work at you. If you are white, especially from the old families, the cold speaks to you of being isolated and undefended on the infinite homestead plains. It sounds like wolves and reverberates like drums in all the hollow places where you wonder who you are and what you would do in extremis. In this cold, you understand at last that you are not brave at all.” -- The Home Place

D.A. Keeley’s debut Bitter Crossing (Midnight Ink) also takes place in the winter. But this time the locale is the border area of Maine.

“Winter never seemed to enter on tiptoe in Aroostook County. It was only October, just one month removed from peak foliage season, but the maples stood bare, as if bracing patiently for the snow.” -- Bitter Crossing

Getting out my winter clothes now.