Nursing School 1943
CHAPTER FIVE
ISN’T THIS A LOVELY DAY?
By 1943, the three of them had learned something about time travel.
Getting there was only part of it.
Every time seemed to give them something more than different clothes and another date on the calendar. It gave them lives to step into, characters to play, and a place within the world they had entered.
Scott was a professor.
Blue and Jean were nursing students.
To everyone around them, there was nothing particularly unusual about any of this. They belonged there.
Only the three of them knew better.
Blue and Jean had entered the nursing program together and arranged to become roommates. In the lives they were playing, they had been friends for years—long enough to know each other’s habits, moods, and peculiarities without requiring much explanation.
Scott had entered their world somewhat differently.
Somewhere along the way, he and Blue had started seeing each other.
And somewhere after that, seeing each other had turned into something considerably more familiar.
Jean knew all about it.
There wasn’t much Blue could have hidden from her anyway.
Blue had a particular way of loving Scott that made secrecy nearly impossible. If he entered a room, she noticed. If he sat somewhere else, she eventually found her way over to him. And if there were six perfectly good feet of empty space between them, Blue tended to regard those six feet as a problem requiring immediate correction.
Scott didn't seem to mind.
By now, Jean had become accustomed to the two of them.
“Blue,” she once said, watching her climb into the back seat beside Scott, “at least pretend you haven’t seen him since breakfast.”
Blue smiled.
“We’re not pretending anything.”
That was pretty much that.
For Jean, nursing school provided considerably more serious things to think about.
There were classes, clinical work, long hours, and always something else to read.
One afternoon, she and Blue stopped in front of the recommended reading board.
Jean studied the titles.
There were quite a few.
She looked them over carefully, apparently applying the highest standards of literary judgment.
“Shortest one.”
Blue followed her eyes down the list.
“The Screwtape Letters.”
Jean looked at her.
That would do.
The title, of course, was already familiar.
Only a short time earlier, Scott had walked out of the library with a copy tucked under his arm. The book had followed them into the Hellcat, where Blue had spent considerably more time trying to reach Scott’s hand than worrying about what C. S. Lewis had written inside it.
The book could wait.
Apparently, it had followed them anyway.
Classes eventually ended, and Blue and Jean met Scott outside.
The afternoon was too pleasant to waste indoors.
They walked for a while and found a quiet place beside the river, where the three of them settled beneath an umbrella and allowed the day to become wonderfully unimportant.
They talked.
They laughed.
Nobody had anywhere particularly urgent to be.
For a little while, 1943 wasn't something written in a history book. It wasn't a collection of dates, battles, speeches, or names that people in another century would be expected to remember.
It was simply where they were.
And it was a lovely day.
The wind arrived first.
Nothing dramatic. Just enough to stir the trees and move across the river.
Then came another gust.
Stronger this time.
Scott looked toward the sky.
A few drops of rain began to fall.
Within minutes, the peaceful afternoon had become something else entirely.
The wind pulled at the umbrella while the three of them hurried along. Rain swept across the path. Thunder rolled somewhere above Cambridge, and the umbrella began behaving as though it had plans of its own.
Scott held on.
Another gust hit.
This time, the umbrella got away from him.
“There it goes!”
Blue reached for it.
And somehow, she caught it.
Of course she did.
By then, staying dry was no longer a serious possibility.
They ran.
They laughed.
The rain kept coming, the wind kept blowing, and then—as though the afternoon had decided it still hadn't done enough—snow began mixing into the weather.
Scott ran ahead through Cambridge while autumn and winter seemed to be arguing over which one of them owned the day.
It wasn't the afternoon any of them had planned.
Maybe that was what made it theirs.
There would always be books waiting to be opened. There would always be classes, responsibilities, plans, and places they intended to go.
But this afternoon would happen only once.
Maybe a lovely day had very little to do with the weather.
Maybe it had more to do with being there to experience it.
Together.
Every day is a blessing, even the ones that don't stay sunny.
🎬 SCREWTAPE LETTERS: SHORTEST ONE 📚🇬🇧
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🎬 ISN’T THIS A LOVELY DAY 🍂☂️⛄️
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