For me, winters in northern Europe were a dark dirge. Weeks of rain, sleet slapping the windows, grim morning darkness and a cold dank wind. The evenings too quickly wrapped their shadowy arms around the city, already hunkered down for the night by mid afternoon.
It’s so dark in Copenhagen, Greenlanders say, and so cold. The cold is easy to understand. European winters can be just plain wet. Grey drizzle hanging in the air, penetrating everything with its damp fingers. But in Nuuk the winter air is not tinged with that lingering damp, but instead is crisp and dry. Minus five is a pleasure. Minus ten is brisk. Minus twenty…well, minus twenty is cold.
But how can Greenlandic winters be brighter than northern Europe? The daylight hours are shorter. In mid-winter Nuuk, there are four hours between sunrise and sunset. But the morning twilight grows langourously from the dwindling night, lingering over each moment, savouring the sweetness of each shade as day emerges from the cocoon of night. Venus, like a beacon, shines down from the purply-blue depths of the starlit morning sky, the glowing orbs of street lamps casting puddles of white light on the snow-lined streets and icy roads. Even the dark night is brightened by the snowy whiteness that blankets mountains, houses, streets. Every light is reflected back in this twinkling icy landscape, so the night seems vibrant, alive.
In the winter mornings, I enjoy the experience of watching the world wake. The dark sky seems lit from below, as the sun, reluctant to rise, skims the horizon, peeks up the world above, sheds its rare purples, and tentative oranges on clouds that receive their gift of winter light, reflecting them across the frigid sky. As I fly out across the icecap on any old morning like this, the grey-blue ice embraces the sky with pinks or purples that they cannot agree on, and so share across the imperceptible horizon between frozen earth and sky.
With spring upon us, the long nights and their sleepy pastel days are past. The mornings are already bright and awake, long before I am. And I cling to the remnants of those slow, sleepy mornings, still hinted at by the now golden light that skims across snowy islands and dark water, that creeps across the peninsula, igniting each window with a deep orange light, before finally bursting over the mountain and bathing our house in brilliant light.
I already miss winter. And by the time she returns in eight months, I’ll miss her beautiful cousins, the golden spring, the brilliant summer, and the burning orange light on the first autumn snow.
