February 1st, Stockholm
I learned recently that the technical definition of the tropics is whether the sun is positioned directly overhead. I was trying to explain to a ten year old Swedish boy how you know you’re in a tropical place, and I was leaning on the weather, the humidity, the wetness, even the creeping, unrelenting vines and trees that creep into windows and break up walls. And then we went to the simple English Wikipedia page and looked it up, and as it turns out, none of those other things matter. It’s all about the sun.
I can’t conceive of the sun being like that, positioned directly overhead, bearing down on the tops of people’s heads with the force of a hammer. I cringe for the delicate skin at the part of my hair that already gets more sun than it should. I imagine that I would need to hide, tuck myself away until the perfectly apportioned 12-hour night was upon us again, and I could safely emerge. The furthest south I've been is Hong Kong, technically tropical, but just barely, and I spent a lot of time in the shade cast by the vertical city.
The sun is low here. It’s one of the things that reminds me, in the midst of normal, daily life, just how far north we really are. The satellite dishes do that, too. They don’t point up at the nice, 45-degree angle here, not like they do in California. No, they point straight out here in Stockholm, facing you head on if you’re looking at them from a rooftop, and when we ventured north of the Arctic Circle, the dishes at the Abisko train station pointed ever-so-slightly down, tracing the curvature of the earth. In December and January, when I went out for a walk at two thirty or three, to catch the last of the daylight, the sun hovered, barely cresting the horizon, bright still, but so weak that I could look right at it, even with my blue eyes. I didn’t have to crane my neck, the way I did as a child, testing out whether adults were right or not about what would happen if I looked into the sun. No, the sun and I were equals, each with our own moderate light, each with our own perfectly appropriate warmth, regarding each other across a field of snow.
You lose things, living like this. You lose the guarantee of warmth, that strangely perceptible movement of molecules, coming from outside of yourself. You are your own powerstation, creating the heat that you need, preserving the heat that you have, taking none of it for granted. There is never quite enough, or there is just enough—I’m never certain which it is. But the grandiose sun god has no power, not like he does further south. People here don’t have to bow or stoop. The sun sinks below the horizon almost as quickly as it emerged, demanding no homage, slipping away as easily as the sacred in the face of hypothermia. Life continues regardless.