Last week was the longest day of the year, June 21, when in Nuuk the sun rose at 2:53 am and set four minutes after midnight the next day. This strange phenomenon – the setting of the sun after midnight – happens for just a few days around this time of year. But then something even stranger happens. On June 28, the sun will set twice in one day, first at midnight, rising again just before three am, and setting again at one minute to midnight.
At this time of year, it never gets dark. The most darkness one has is a shadowy light in the early hours of the morning. But on a fine day, the sunlight at 8 pm feels like midday. Until my son was accustomed to it, he would regularly ask as I tucked him into bed, “Is it night time now?” And while my husband sleeps soundly, the blazing sunlight often wakes me at four in the morning. But already the light is changing – slowly at first, but it will hasten as the weeks go by.
With the longest day past, the sun slowly, slowly sinks lower in the sky each day, the sunset creeping back from the depths of the ‘night’ toward the late evenings. The sunlight hours shrinking. Given that it snowed only two weeks ago, right now that thought feels a bit hard to take. Hopefully we can still look forward to many weeks of stunning blue skies and long pastel-coloured evenings. But the gradual darkening of those evenings, already underway, reminds me always that in Greenland the summer is over before it even begins.
