It recently occurred to me that I haven’t written anything here in several weeks. To my vast legions of fans, I apologize. I hope you have been able to go about your lives without too much psychic distress.
Fact is, I haven’t been writing because I’ve been really busy working on my dissertation. Yes, I’ve finally gotten some traction and have begun to put in a lot of work, and now there is a light at the end of the tunnel. So I’m feeling good, despite the fact that the weather outside is the meteorological equivalent of stomach flu.
I can’t tell you how ready I was, moving to Sweden, for a real Nordic winter: Giant snowbanks, people skiing to work, rosy-nosed ice skaters circling Brueghel-style in the harbor, steaming tankards of glögg being passed around, smoke wafting in great puffs from the chimneys while paper stars glowed in the windows, and so on. Instead, what I got was: slush. Even though it has been an “unusually cold winter” in many parts of the Northern Hemisphere, in Sweden it has been the warmest winter on record, with temperatures here in the pretty-far-north bobbing inanely up and down around the freezing point like one of those red-and-yellow plastic drinking-birdy toys we all had back in the Seventies. OK, I know you don’t know what I’m talking about. Back to the metaphor depot.
There has been hardly any skiing here on the coast, since the weather won’t stay below freezing for more than a couple of days. We have gotten snow, but almost always bookended by rain, which does not make for good ski conditions. The one thing the weather has done perfectly is to create ideal conditions for me to fall on my ass. When it rains all day and then sinks below freezing, it’s enough to make my five-minute commute home from work look like a Three Stooges show. (You do know the Three Stooges, don’t you? If not, don’t worry—it was something we had before YouTube.)
Annelie on thick ice
So apart from a few times out with the cross-country skis, we haven’t done much in the way of outdoor winter activities. One very nice exception was a weekend we recently spent with our friend Jonas and his family up in Östersund, where it’s mountainous enough to have a different climate. Östersund, like Härnösand, is partly on the mainland and partly on an island (in a big lake, in case you were wondering), so water plays a big role there, too. But unlike the testy Gulf of Bothnia, Östersund’s lake, Storsjön (which means “Big Lake”), freezes nicely, such that everyone can ski and skate all over the place all winter. In the pictures here, you see us doing a bit of that. I also got to try long-distance ice skates for the first time; it was terrific.
They do all manner of things on the ice in Östersund.
This was enough to convince me that a proper Nordic winter would be wonderful, and I still hold out a smidgen of hope for some real cold before spring comes in July. OK, just kidding—spring here actually comes in May. I asked one of my students who is from Kiruna—which is the real, undisputed north of Sweden—when it was nicest, and she said “For skiing, probably March or April”. That’s when they have what’s called vårvinter, or “spring-winter”. I’ll have to write more about the many different seasons in Sweden some time.
Långfärdsskriskor are cool!
Of course, it may not be like that this year. According the the special measurements used to define “spring” here (having to do with the average temperature over a certain period), spring started in Stockholm at the end of February. There are trees already producing pollen. Many migratory birds never bothered to leave, and are now nesting. The real losers have been the animals like hares and ermines, which moulted to a white coat at the beginning of the winter, and now stand out like flamenco dancers in an operating room.
So I still have my skis by the door but am getting a bit despondent. Today it was foggy with a biting wind and sheets of rain. It’s almost enough to drive one to write a dissertation…