David's thoughts...

Winter Solstice

It is 7:30 a.m. as I sit down to write this.  Looking out the windows in our living room it is still pitch black. I know that I still have at least two hours till the sun comes over the mountains. I find myself looking forward to the 21^st of December like I looked forward to Christmas when I was a kid.  The 21^st is winter solstice in the northern hemisphere.

Solstice in Alaska is the magical date when the minutes of daylight start increasing each day.  I’ve never given it too much thought before, but up here it is a really big deal. 

The Alaska we fell in love with and dream about is green and beautiful, with more hours of daylight than a human can handle. It is a place with trails to hike, rushing rivers and streams full of salmon and mountains too big to describe. That Alaska seems like such a distant memory that I have to remind myself what it was like to keep my spirits strong. The Alaska of winter is mostly black and white.  It is still amazingly beautiful, but in an Ansel Adams sort of way.

 

If my calculations are correct, by the 21^st we will have lost about 40 more minutes of morning light and another 40 minutes of evening light.  That should put direct sunlight times somewhere around 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., give or take.  That doesn’t mean it is completely dark after those times.  There is twilight, the time right before the sun comes up and after it goes behind the mountains.  It doesn’t seem to get “nighttime dark” until 4 to 5 p.m. Since the ground and trees are covered with snow, there is a serious amount of reflected light all night long from the moon and stars. However, when it is cloudy, it is seriously dark for long periods of time each day!

David's thoughts...

Life is full of perspectives.  How you choose to look at things, your opinion, your point of view, all point to whether you see the cup half full or half empty…Here in Alaska a “greenhorn” has to change his perspective mighty quick or that cup won’t be even half full, it will freeze and break. 

As a teacher in Kansas, I got irritated every winter when the kids weren’t allowed to go out to recess because 32* was too cold or when people ignored the real temperature and talked about the “feels like” temperature. Looking back, I can see that people in Kansas, including me, judged the cold by how close the thermometer was to the 32* freezing mark. Any number approaching that freezing mark was COLD.  On those rare occasions when it dipped down to 0*, it seemed too cold to do anything, inside or out.

When I got up this morning, I glanced at the thermometer as I was fixing my pot of coffee. (It is always nice to know whether I need to put a coat on to move Shawna’s car out of the garage. Negative numbers often times earn a coat.)  This morning, the number I was looking at was 21.  I looked closer to make sure that I wasn’t missing the little "-" that has been in front of the numbers lately. Nope! “Heat wave!” I yelled to Shawna.  While she scurried off to find her cooler shoes and decide if her sweater was going to be too warm today, I debated whether I really needed to warm up her car at all.

I guess my point is, that our perspectives are changing as they relate to the cold.  Already this winter, we have seen more subzero temperatures than I have seen in all my 48 years combined and all the Alaskans are telling us to enjoy the mild winter weather.  My view of warm has changed also. To me, if it has that little “-“ in front of the number it is cold and anything above zero is pretty nice.  Temperatures rising above 32* are exciting to think about and toasty warm in my mind.  I have noticed that the moisture in my nose hairs starts to freeze at anything lower than -15 and I prefer mittens instead of gloves at all temps below 0.

I am also realizing that my view is going to probably continue to change about this topic as the temperatures get lower.  Shawna tells me that kids go out to recess until the temps hit -20, maybe lower and the locals were operating as normal on the day the temperature bottomed out at -19.  I find I must continue to remind myself that life up here is built to survive in the cold and God didn’t bring us all the way up here to live in fear of what the weather each day may hold.  I remind myself that God is in control and when I place my focus on him, there is happiness and reassurance that life will be fine. Perspective.