White Nights

I remember reading in a Dostoyevsky novel about the White Nights of St. Petersburg, summer nights when the sky would become dim and pale, but never quite dark. St. Petersburg is 60° north, five degrees further north than Copenhagen, but it’s just a few hundred short miles further up the Baltic. This is our first Copenhagen summer, and the days do seem nearly endless. Sunset is at 10:00, but there is still twilight at 11:00, and the sky remains a faintly luminous blue-gray even at 12:00. You go to sleep in daylight, and you wake up in daylight.

What I never realized when I was reading Dostoyevsky is how cold those white nights probably were. It’s 9:00 p.m. right now but I don’t particularly care to go outside because it’s in the 50s and, of course, windy. Oh for a warm summer night, with maybe a chirping cricket or two. Of course, Seattle isn’t exactly known for its balmy nights either—this is just a more extreme version. We had three warm days back at the beginning of June. Perhaps we’ll have some more before the summer ends.

We’ve been busy with visitors recently—first our friend Mary, then my sister Peggy and my mom Vivian. Receiving your first visitors after you move to a new city is exciting—you get to impress them with what you’ve learned about your new home town, and you also get to see the city anew through their eyes. What you shouldn’t do is get lost while showing your guest around the town, but that’s another story.


Mary at the Viking Ship Museum, demon- strating the Japanese soft-focus technique.





Mom in our dining room. She found the weather a bit cool.









Mom, Peggy, and Jonetta at Louisiana Museum, 25 miles up the north coast.




We’ve also been cycling when the weather allows—Denmark is criss-crossed with cycle trails. We bought a guidebook and map at the Danish Cycling Federation, and now we’ve tried a few of the trails in North Sjælland (Zealand). The trails can be difficult to follow—they meander through field and forest, mostly on paved roads and paths but often down dirt roads and trails and through suburban bystreets. Usually the trails are well marked with little signs, but every now and then you’ll come to a fork in the road and get absolutely no help. Somehow we never seem to go completely off the route, and eventually we find one of the little signs—it’s like that game where you start with a clue that leads you to a place where you find another clue which leads you to the next place, and so on.


Danish forest in April. The white carpet is anemones.








Danish farm in North Sjælland