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
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