Here in November

Approximately 3:30 pm, mid-November, looking southwest. Doesn't get any lighter than in that direction.

The leaves are almost all gone, save for a late-turning bramble bush in the courtyard outside and some stubborn willows. The grass remains, for now; the snow that fell while we were back in California wasn't nearly enough to burn it out, not yet. But it'll go, too, in time. And the sun begins to dip below the horizon at about 3:30. Or maybe it's 3:20 now. I haven't looked in a little while, and we're still losing something like five minutes of daylight with each spin on our axis. 

As far as I can tell, complaining about winter in Stockholm is the ex-pat sport of choice. And maybe I'll partake once it's February, or worse, March. But for now, it's just above freezing, sometimes even closer to 10 degrees celcius (one of my favorite temperatures, as it equates exactly to 50 degrees farenheit). I can handle that kind of weather. I've only brought out my mega-parka once, when I went to get some pizzas while fighting off a cold, and it was still overkill.

Granted, there is the darkness. I've spent so much time asking myself what I think of the darkness that I don't really know what I think. It's light when I wake up, which is good, though I know that won't last. And five pm in the winter, regardless of where I live, seems like a very reasonable time for it to be fully dark. So it's really just about that strange window of darkness, now lasting for just over an hour, in the late afternoon. 

It's tricky, that hour or so. I have to remember that it's not dinnertime when I get hungry around four--just time for a snack. My work for the day isn't done yet, either, and if I plan on running outside, since I like to run in the woods, I probably should do so a little bit earlier than usual. It really is the flip side of summer, when I would consider maybe sort of winding down as the sun began to vanish, only to realize that it was already 10 pm. While it's probably treason to admit this in this country, in this month, that actually got a little annoying. When we went to New York in July, there were stars. I'd missed stars.

But it would be naive to expect that the weak winter daylight (or lack thereof, really) won't get to me eventually. When I told a friend of mine where we were moving, he responded, "Oh cool. I've always wondered how I would respond to an environment that extreme." I guess it really is that, when you think about where humans originated; we were/probably-still-are designed to live awfully close to the equator, and we haven't been away from it for that long, evolutionarily speaking. It might do strange things to our brains, the lack of warmth and daylight. I'm sure it's no coincidence that the so-called "vodka belt" is located entirely in the great white north. Alcohol is a pretty reliable pick-me-up, at least in the short term. Self-medication is nothing if not an indication of human adaptability at its finest. (And don't get me started on Nordic countries and coffee. What I miss most about food and drink in the States is decaf on demand. Yeah, I said it.)

But on the other hand, I'm actually a pretty decent example of the extent to which people have managed to evolve for life well away from the equator. Blond hair, blue eyes, pale pale skin--check, check, and check. Back in California I had to remember both my sunglasses and sunscreen, or I got burned. Literally. Forgot about that.

So we'll see how we get along over the next few months, the darkness and me. I'm really hoping I won't turn into the inverse of Al Pacino in that movie about murders in Alaska where he can't sleep because it's too light. (Eyeshades, Al. Eyeshades are a necessity.) But I don't actually know how it'll be. After all, we're only about a month out from the solstice, at which point it'll start snowing (I hope!) and gradually getting lighter. Right now I light candles, turn on the music, consider the gym, research basement jazz clubs--and think about those poor people up there in Kiruna, or worse, Alert, Canada. Now THAT'S darkness. I really don't know anything down here.