The sun sets at 3:45pm and its dark by 4:30pm. Haven’t quite got used to this reduced day. My wife arrived home around 10pm from Helsinki – even darker earlier there – and brought us back some dark black sweet Finnish lakrids (licorice) and a bottle of vodka that had been steeped in charred barrels made from the wood of old saunas.
When its mørk (dark) here, you need hygge (books have been written on the subject of hygge and the direct translation doesn’t do hygge justice so I won’t bother to put it here now). Delicious teeth blackening old fashion made from the root licorice is a bright star in the dark firmament that blankets Denmark for months on end. The vodka was smoky good. Not as peaty as an Islay single malt so one guesses the sweat never sank into the wood.
Waking up at 7am never bothered me in Philadelphia. The sun, even at the end of November, was rising. Seven marks the end of magic hour as the sun finally breaks the horizon a minute later. All the possibilities of the day seemed more present as the sun streamed into our bedroom.
Copenhagen is further north. Eleven hundred miles north. So we have a magic 40 minutes? The sun here climbs over the horizon at 8:10. If the sky is clear, as it was yesterday, the early morning light here is spectacular. Long low angled light. The sun never climbs higher than 10 degrees above the horizon.
Two days of clear skies allow the heat to dissipate quickly. Our first frost arrived.
It disappeared quickly except for a few patches in the shadows.
The sun in Philadelphia climbs three times higher than it does in Copenhagen over the course of the day. Consequently, the changes in the quality of the light are more varied there than here.
Here we get several hours of long shadows or not.
Today not. Rain. Gray. A murky day that makes you want to stay indoors and light a fire in the fireplace. Sad to say I have no fireplace and must make do with candles, which is what most Danes do.
The day passes quickly. Don’t blink. Absorb. Absorb it all. Soak up the precious vitamin d. The blanket wraps itself around us without veil unprompted unwanted. Strike a match.
