cucumber time

It's been a string of days that are starting to merge into each other, each one a sky thinly washed with clouds, full of wind that sends plumes and mini-tornados of snow off the roofs of the buildings outside my work window. The ravens are soaring past the windows on the air currents, and AMPOP's "3 hours of daylight" seems to come up on my iPod's shuffle with alarming frequency. How does this little machine "know" how well this song fits right now? Although we are now up to a dazzling five and a half hours, I am still going to work and coming home from work in the dark, and the sun only appears and shines when there's a large enough tear in the cloud cover. On the weekends I wake to that flat winter light, completely devoid of gold, purified and filtered by the snowcover. It's indeed a frigid color but I love the way it diffuses through a room and makes the palest blue of the sky on those occasional clear days seem so vivid.

Still, the cycle of the day has moments of alarming color, when the reflection from the rising sun turns the cloudbank behind Esja lavender, and the mountains further to the north appear and disappear like white ghosts as the day passes and the clouds move. When the sun does appear, I let it burn my eyes as I squint at my computer screen, reluctant to close off those few rays when they are so rare. Such is winter in Iceland.