{"id":19,"date":"2006-12-26T18:09:01","date_gmt":"2006-12-27T02:09:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/2006\/12\/19\/"},"modified":"2006-12-26T18:14:44","modified_gmt":"2006-12-27T02:14:44","slug":"19","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/2006\/12\/19\/","title":{"rendered":"Hello Darkness, My Old Friend"},"content":{"rendered":"

Originally published in<\/em> The Nome Nugget, Summer 1995 <\/em><\/p>\n

Something in my soul gets weary of all this light. In winter’s doldrums, I wish and wish for July days of sun. But when they’re here, I sometimes wish they would just go away.<\/p>\n

It may have something to do with my ancestry. My skin, eyes, and hair were designed for about 11 degrees farther south. About the 53rd parallel on a farm in a cloudbank in Europe is really where I ought to be. When I apply that 50 octane sunblock up here towards the Arctic Circle, my skin cells are shouting, “Are you nuts? Go back to Holland where you belong! Take us to a peat bog in Ireland! Put us herding sheep near Loch Lomond! We can’t take it here!”<\/p>\n

My sense of time always seems to be off. Just when I finally get used to 5 p.m. looking a certain way on Front Street, the light changes and 5 p.m. looks like 2 p.m. and the post office is already closed. I’ve never needed to refer to my watch as much as I do living here.<\/p>\n

I’ve also never used sunglasses so much in my life, either. I’ve gone through three pairs since April. And if somebody finds a pair of cool mirrored glasses in the foothills of Grand Singa-took by the turnoff to Cape Wooley, let me know. This last pair I just picked up at Hanson’s may be my last for a while, though. August in Nome means we welcome darkness back into town.<\/p>\n

We lose about 5 minutes of light a day, about half an hour a week. The dark bookends of sunrise and sunset are squeezing in. When I get up now I see street lights out the window. This is big news after a summer of mornings where I didn’t bother to turn on any lights to make the coffee.<\/p>\n

Oh, we’re not Barrow. I tremble in humbleness in the presence of someone who lives in Barrow. That’s farther north, farther cold, and farther Arctic than Nome and I take off my IT baseball cap to the folks who live there. Barrowite Earl Finkler’s excellent piece recently in The Anchorage Daily News<\/em> spoke of his melancholy in waving goodbye to the endless sun of summer this time of year. He doesn’t use the word “autumn.” It’s the “transition into winter” and street lights mean winter up there, too.<\/p>\n

We’re checking on the sleds stored under the stairs. The snow boots that lay all summer in a dark, sandy clump in the back of the closet are getting slammed against the porch bannister, dirt and sand raining down on the weeds turning yellow. My sons’ long johns that were just fine last February are suddenly a foot off the ankle. It’s time to outfit the family again. We’re getting ready for Nome’s off season when the paper is late and the dairy case at the grocery store is sometimes empty of milk because the planes can’t land. Our isolation becomes more apparent, our dependence on Anchorage and the Lower 48 more annoying. It’s going to get cold, and it’s going to get dark. The dog days of August are numbered. Mush!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Originally published in The Nome Nugget, Summer 1995 Something in my soul gets weary of all this light. In winter’s doldrums, I wish and wish for July days of sun. But when they’re here, I sometimes wish they would just go away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-travel-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}