My eyelids flickered in the grey November Copenhagen morning. It seemed too dark to be waking. Then my focus fixed on the red numbers of my bedside digital clock and I sat bolt upright.
“$&@#!”
It was past seven. My flight to Greenland departed at nine. I was about forty five minutes from the airport and I hadn’t yet packed.
That was my first winter journey to Greenland. I don’t remember much about the time between leaping from my bed and slapping down my ticket on the check-in counter. But I made it – just. When I finally heaved my too-heavy bag into the run-down hotel room inside the terminal building in Kangerlussuaq, I was exhausted. What on Earth had I packed in that frenzied five minutes before I had left home? Apparently four winter jackets, a random selection of clothing, and no warm hats or gloves. Just as well I would spend the whole week inside the hotel, where I was attending a workshop.
I saw very little of the Greenland winter that November almost fifteen years ago, peering through the cold glass of the conference room window into the darkness outside. Clouds rolled in, a chill wind blew. Now and then a plane arrived and the building briefly filled with passengers in transit, before they all filed back outside and the flashing lights of their onward flights blinked away in the darkness. One afternoon, hundreds of Japanese tourists flooded in and the restaurant was overwhelmed, every room filled. They had come to see the aurora borealis. But the wind blew and the clouds rolled on, and in the morning they were all gone and the building silent again – their longed-for lights hidden in murky skies. By the time I also boarded my homeward flight later that week, tired and hungover, I felt I had barely touched the Greenland winter. I arrived back to a dreary, grey Copenhagen, bundled into a taxi and passed the journey home staring at street lights passing in the darkness, rain pattering on the cold window.
Now I live in the Greenlandic winter. And it’s not the dark, cold drudge one might expect. In fact, I look forward to coming back to Greenland from the greyness of November in Europe. Just a week ago – the delayed winter not yet here – I peered longingly out of the bus window into the afternoon darkness, wishing for winter. And then, suddenly, it arrived in a silent, overnight delivery. I woke to a world of whiteness, a foot of powdery snow draped over every surface – hills and houses, roads and roofs, glittering mounds of powder in puddles of streetlight, the identities of the lumpy shapes beneath now concealed for the winter. Although the daylight hours continue to shrink away, the winter light has returned, reflected in a million ice crystals, in a sky flooded with falling fat flakes, drifting down. Winter is here.
