Gardening Late, Reminiscing About Summers in Denmark and Considering the Passing of Time
Early this afternoon, Mrs. Denmarkguy left to go camping with a friend for a couple of days. For no particular reason, I was struggling with focus today, so I decided to tackle some yardwork, instead of "regular" work.
Well, the yardwork went on, and on, and on, until I finally called it quits at about 9:00pm.
The fact that daylight now remains until well after 9:00pm reminds me of my youth in Denmark.
A Long Way North...
Denmark is a Long Way North although people don't typically think about it that way... and in the middle of the summer it often doesn't get fully dark until well after 10:00pm... in fact, there is a 6-week period centered around the Summer Solstice during which it never gets entirely dark. We call them "light nights" because you can still see colors even without artificial light.
Western Washington is not quite as far north as my childhood home, but it's far enough north that I could sit outside at 9:07pm taking notes on my phone for what would become this post... after a long day of weeding in the yard. There's something "familiar" feeling about this place even though it is not where I was born. As I sat there and chilled out after yardwork, I heard bird song that reminded me very much of my childhood.
Sometimes I wonder whether we end up longing for where we were originally from, as we age. Even though I have lived in the United States for over 40 years, there are still times when I think of Denmark as "home" and where I am now just as a place I'm visiting. However, if you look at it objectively, Denmark is really the place I would be visiting and the US is what I would call home.
I expect these are feelings expats all over the world probably experience at one time or another. The fact that I am reminiscing and maybe even longing a little bit for my birth place doesn't mean that I'm about to saddle up and move back there! It just means that I'm sitting there, thinking about it.
I have actually lived in over a dozen different countries in the course of my life... most of those before I was 21... and there are certain things I remember about each of them. As I have aged, I've noticed that the positive things tend to stand out more, and the negative things have faded into the background. Maybe that's just a part of how our brains are wired... and why the term "rose colored lenses of passing time" exists!
When I reflect on that same line of thinking in the context of people I've known, I realize that I have increasingly become able to recognize some of the good aspects of people that once were friends but the relationship was broken off because they turned out to be completely incompatible with my interests and temperament and/or vice-versa.
I think about the way we sometimes think about our exes and say things like "well, there's a good reason he or she is my EX!" But at the same time let us not forget that there were things about that person that we clearly liked well enough for them to get close/intimate enough with us that all these years later think of them as an ex.
This Human Experience can be pretty complicated sometimes!
The long yardwork session was a good diversion for me. Tomorrow, I have a full load in the back of the truck to take to the yard waste center. There were a lot of thistles, nettles, beggar's lice and thorny blackberry vines in the debris I pulled out... so I decided not to compost it all here.
And now... it is time for me to call it a day. Thanks for stopping by, and have a great remainder of your week!
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Created at 2023-05-24 01:02 PST
0839/2094
I can relate to the confused feelings about which country is my home. Particularly, at this time of year and specifically because of the daylight thing.
I don’t long for home often, because more times than not I feel that I am at home here in Japan, but at this time of year, when the sun is setting at just after six, I really miss the longer days and tend to think about how much of my youth I spent outdoors and well into the evening during late spring and summer months.
I’m younger than you and have been living abroad as long as you, so I wonder what my experience will be in the future. It seems that ex-pats tend to follow similar lines of development. Much like children become like their parents, I can sense my own timeline and experiences many of the people I know who came to Japan before me.
I never thought that this would happen, because I wanted to believe that I could do something about it, but here I am fourteen years later saying and thinking things that were once said to me by other, older, more experienced ex-pats.
Life is funny, isn’t it.
It's a strange thing that I can't really explain. And I'm not sure anybody would really understand it unless they had lived in a country other than the one in which they were born, and for an extended period of time.
Last time I went back to Denmark I distinctly remember sitting in the backyard at my aunt's house and thinking to myself "I am OF this place but I don't belong IN this place." Similarly, when I am here in western Washington I find myself thinking I am "not OF this place but I belong IN this place."
The power of place is strong. When I moved from Texas to here in Washington state back in 2006 part of my motivation was that I never found a sense of belonging in Texas. This, in spite of the fact that I had lived there for over 20 years. Some of it had to do with that very thing you were talking about Summers and Winters not being that different somehow and it felt "wrong" in a way I can't quite characterize.
I still ponder the fact that it was ultimately the geography that made a bigger difference than the culture or the people or the friends or the work.
That is really the perfect way of saying it:
I could never explain it, but I never felt quite like where I was supposed to be when I lived in the US, and it affected every part of my life.
But for whatever reason, when I came to Japan, everything just clicked. It’s so weird. I feel like I had to come half around the world to find my home and a place where I could just functionally live a normal life.
And I agree, I don’t think it has much to do with people or culture, there is definitely something to what you call the power of place.
Interesting stuff.
I grew up in the north end of this valley and have lived here most of my life. The thing I found about living in other parts of the world is my inability to orient myself to the cardinal points unless there was a good sized north/south river in the area.
Without that ability to orient I felt lost and rudderless. I also found myself gravitating to places that were very similar to this valley. But in the end I found myself back here...
It very interesting how we "experience" other places.
When I moved from Europe to Texas (college) it was not so much a case of culture shock as it was the fact that my surroundings felt wrong. I didn't know the trees and the land, and various part of the whole that helped me feel at ease were missing. It also felt wrong to trade "inside in the winter, outside in the summer" for the exact opposite... because 100 degrees (38-39C) and humid meant being inside, in front of the air conditioner vent!
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I recently read a novel by Arnaldur Indridason, an Icelandic author. There he talks about nights that last almost 24 hours. You talk about a day that seems to have no end. For a person like me, living in a tropical country, where days and nights last almost the same, it is difficult to imagine what life would be like in a situation of endless days and nights.
It seems inevitable that everyone who emigrates always goes back in their memory to the times when they were in the other place. Many people from my country who have emigrated tell similar stories, they always miss the land they left behind.
Thank you for the publication dear @denmarkguy . A big hug from Maracay.
Pd. Sorry for my bad English, I use the translator.
I often end up gardening for many hours once I get started. One thing leads to another! I think: "I'm just going to pull weeds out of this bed here," and then I realize there are weeds coming up in many different places, and I should really trim some things back, and deal with some ants, and haul some brush away and clean around the firepit, etc. etc. Next thing I know, it's well past sunset! (But it's a great time to listen to audio books.)