Sew The Way Home: Mars lys

Welcome back, daylight! The sunrise/sunset cycle. I love you. I have to love you so hard before the sun just takes over the show completely for a while, very very soon. Tyler reported auroras after a late night walk yesterday, but I think that might be the last of them...

That bright dot high in the sky is Jupiter, who has kept us company all winter long!

Our friend Nuno taught us a bunch of new functions on our dinky little handheld camera recently. The above photos I took using the underwater function. I wanted to get the nighttime colors right, and this seemed to cut through the dark, dark blueness to about the right degree. The first and third are still a bit more washed out than they were in real life, and blurry or crooked because I had to balance them on things for the longer exposure, but I'm happy with the other two. And we are so pleased to have all these surprising new settings to play with. Tyler kept exclaiming "It's like we have a whole new camera!" Tusen takk, Nuno!

Here's me playing with the "toy camera" setting…

PS: The birds are back! A few, the early birds… no worms to be had around here, though.

Oh, springtime. Every year it hits me in the same way, with a buzz of energy and excitement that threatens to knock my little heart into overdrive, and then after about three days of thrill and anticipation I want to run back into a mini-dose of hibernation. It can feel distressing when I hit the tipping point and want to do nothing but close the curtains on a rare and lovely day, but it seems to be part of my pattern: I just need a little break. And personally, I find the seasonal change near the poles actually more rapid and astonishing than seasonal change in my supposedly temperate home-climate of New England. Yes, we still have snow and cold and see no end to that in sight though March is well underway, but the light! No, the arctic is now awake: insistently, brightly awake. Snow scooters roaring all day long and the sunset lingering on into the night. I've been preparing my 5:30 am breakfast by natural daylight for a week now. Tyler sleeps right through it, no annoying morning flashbulbs as the neon light below our counter pops alive.

So I take a little break from the day-time time and go on a later walk in the dusky light and feel calmed. The days are so busy for everyone: work, tourists descending, certain foods suddenly scarce at the butikken, my norskklassekamerater can't find any time to finish their oppgave for the week. Du er voksne, du bestemmer, my teacher says: you are adults, you decide. We decide to be out of doors, not inside studying verbs…

We go to Barentsburg, where we eat soup with pork in it, and then take a tour of town during which a young Russian woman points out the barnyard: "Here is where we raise our pigs. Is just normal life, nothing special, but is nice for us because we always have fresh meat."

We go around the other side of the bay and look at the old mining relics over there…

We go to the camp site out by the airport and wish for more birds to come soon…

We go to Templefjorden on an impossibly lovely day that was meant to be windy and cloudy, and eat peanut butter and jellies in the sunshine and feel like kings even though our toes are frozen.

Side story: our friend and guide for the day shared the history of this little shack, which was the home base of a Norwegian trapper for 10 years back in the early 1900's. His first wife came up to spend the winter with him, and gave birth to her first child alone in there while he was three weeks away by dogsled in Barentsburg… give me a break, what a lot in life!