My favorite and saddest day of the year
June 20/21, depending on a few calculations I’m ignorant of how to make, is the day of the year with the most daylight. Here in northern Europe, especially, that is a very long day. The dawn starts to show around 4 AM, and it isn’t completely dark until after 9:30 PM. Up in northern Scandinavia, the sun doesn’t even set at all for a few weeks.
I love the long periods of light, and it just makes my job easier, despite the frustrating delays. Yesterday was one of my 3 country days, when I had breakfast and my first two appointments in or near Sprout City in Belgium. I then had a train for 12:53 to Rotterdam in the Netherlands, where I had to change for Utrecht. In Utrecht, I was picked up by a guy from my office there for the ride out to our office there. I had only planned 90 minutes there before getting back in a car for the ride to Düsseldorf and home. The train from Brussels was very late AND there was an atypical traffic jam in Utrecht. Calculating that my planned 90 minutes was being reduced by two thirds, I started making frantic calls ahead, recruiting some help that I hate asking others to do. But my wonderful Dutch team was there and ready. We got everything done, printouts, security, the whole package done in 29 minutes, and another guy (Algerian, but lives in NL) got me back to the station in time to make my 5:04 PM train back to Germany. I was back before 8 PM in full daylight. We ate dinner outside. Our two granddaughters are with us for the week while their parents are doing some big inauguration down south on the shores of the “Bodensee,” or Lake of Constance, across from Switzerland. I read them Bartholomew and the Oobleck before they went inside, and my wife got them ready for bed. I don’t know she does it. By the time I was back, she had cooked—from scratch, mind you—a salad of sliced cucumber with pepper and paprika, roasted asparagus spears, boiled, sliced potatoes, and a salmon filet roasted and then poached in fresh lemon and a light Italian red pesto sauce.
I was fairly zapped out by the time I got home, but our granddaughters are a delight, by now automatically speaking English to me, and German to my wife. They are 5 and 7. I love these long days, especially since yesterday was a rare warm sunny day, for which Belgium, the Netherlands and northwestern Germany are not known. The weather in Paris, the day before, had been pretty much the same, too.
So, now, from today straight through to December 21, the days get steadily shorter. The difference will become more apparent in mid July, when we head for Cape Cod, Massachusetts for our (my) several weeks of life-saving down time. Boston is many hundreds of miles to the south of Germany, so the days will immediately start getting shorter in three weeks for me. Then, before I return to Europe, I have something to do in Brazil, a place I have never been, so I will be away for a longer time than usual. I am not coming back to Germany from Dallas for just 8 days, so I’ll hang around North America for a week, and head down to Brazil from there. I have no idea what to expect, climate-wise, but one of our department heads in Dallas is an immigrant from Brazil, and he can fill me in.
And here I had promised myself I would try to cut down on my insane travel schedule once I hit age 70, and that was three years ago!
All spring long i look forward to mid June with its overdose of long daylight and warmer temperatures. There is the added bonus of it being the season of the “orange-red.” The “orange-red” is a special kind of apricot from southeastern France that has a sweet, intense flavor like no other. They cost almost double what other fresh apricots cost, and they are SO worth it. Our granddaughters consume them like sharks in a feeding frenzy, and the local fresh produce shop, run by a friendly Alawite Kurd from southwestern Turkey, always puts aside a few kilos of them for me when a fresh shipment arrives, because if he doesn’t, they are always sold out before I get there. Oo-ess-peh, Effendi! He insisted that I learn a few words of Alawite Kurdish, so I did.
So, today I will enjoy the sunlight, the apricots, and our granddaughters. The insanity resumes soon enough. Starting Monday, I have to be in Brussels, München (Munich), back to Düsseldorf Wednesday morning for my wife’s birthday, and then in Madrid by midnight. And that’s just through Wednesday. There is no rest for the weary.
But for this weekend, at least, I will quote from a translation from the Aramaïc to the ancient Greek to a popular modern English translation: let there be light!
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You never have insomnia.
Tonight, it's 12:42 a.m. and I'm up because of, you guessed it, insomnia! Some nights I don't successfully turn off my brain, and then it keeps me awake!
But I'm so glad to be awake, so I can read about your current situation. You are a very lucky man! You always tell the most interesting stories and I can really participate in them, since we were there. That was a great week.
