Spring & Summer

Super juice for breakfast with green apples and kale. And Pär Lagerkvist, a most wonderful Swedish author. In the past, when I still considered myself very much Swedish and worked hard at spreading Swedish culture wherever I went, I would almost always bring a book by Pär Lagerkvist as a gift to whomever I visited. In Poland, I found a bookstore that carried his most popular titles, and they were so cheap I bought twenty of them, and handed them out whenever I could. Pär Lagerkvist (1891-1974) received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1951. He wrote poems and plays as well as novels. His novels are short and easy to read and most importantly, unforgettable. Above Barabbas, but there’s also The Dwarf and The Sibyl. All of them short, easy reads.

This past winter was particularly hard and long here on the East Coast, and spring seems slow to emerge. Though we’ve had a few beautiful days, of the kind when you can discard your jacket for a couple of hours, spring still hasn’t really arrived.

In New York, spring is a dreamy season because it is so short. Sandwiched between a cruel, cold winter and an intense, hot, and sweaty summer, spring is a couple of weeks of perfect weather. In Sweden a spring jacket is a necessity. Here, I find myself rarely using one. You literally go from a winter coat to no coat at all.

I clearly remember the arrival of one spring back in Sweden. I was a college student and I had this job cleaning a shoe store. Sundays, I’d take my dog with me and walk over to the store, clean it, and then walk back home again. This particular Sunday was as lazy as usual, the town streets sleepy and empty and me and my dog were the only ones out. There was still a bit of snow on the sidewalks, but the air was high, the sky baby blue and the sun clear and strong. Then suddenly, I heard the chirping of birds! It is magical really, how delicately spring announces its arrival. Bird song. After you hear the first birds of spring, doesn’t life somehow feel different? A little bit of bird song and you feel like skipping.

I first visited New York with my mom when I was in my late teens. It was in July and it was so hot I could barely stand it. I thought I’d faint standing in line for the ferry out to see the Statue of Liberty. And actually, a few summers later, I did faint: In the street in front of the Roosevelt Hotel on 45^th Street. From heat syncope. It took years for me to get used to the heat and humidity of summer here. But last summer, when I’d been away from New York for a year, the heat was one of the things I most looked forward to. I have no problem with it anymore; I now like my summers sizzling hot.

The one season that I cannot bear is winter. I guess I’ve had my share of winters. As if Swedish winters weren’t enough, I also experienced winter in Greenland, and I doubt it can get much worse than that. I won’t go into a lengthy description of it. Only this: By the water in Nuuk – which is the capital of Greenland – stands a statue of Hans Egede, its founder. This is the saddest, most dejected statue I’ve seen in my life. Not so much for how it looks, but for what it looks out over: Endless, icy seas with no hope for warmth whatsoever. No hope at all. It was a dark and dreary November day, the day I saw that statue. The skies were brutally black and gunmetal gray and merged seamlessly with the roaring, angry water, which was of the exact same color. The winter wind ripped and tore at my coat, my scarf, and my hair sticking out from under my hat. You couldn’t speak for that wind tore your words too. And there, on a little mound, stood the steadfast Hans Egede with his cane looking out over the water, and I knew exactly what he was thinking:
“Oh, if only spring would come soon!”

Hans Egede, the founder of Greenland's capital Nuuk, stands on a mound overlooking the Labrador Sea. When I saw this statue, there were no beautiful northern lights behind it; instead angry, dark waters in front. Image courtesy of Profil-Rejser.