Indian Winter

Ordinarily, this is the time of year when our lives open up as Denmark begins to blossom with warming, lighter days.

“Ordinarily” may as well be retired from the English language at this point: it was over a year ago that I ended my first blog post of the lockdown by observing that hopefully the next post would reflect a more normal life.

Abnormal is the new normal.

So despite my being a little late with this post (I really do try to keep myself on a monthly schedule), it’s a little thin. Almost anorexic.

We begin way back on the penultimate day of February: it was Søren and Bodil’s turn to host our bi-monthly family lunch. It felt as through spring were right around the corner: Søren grilled up some sausages for lunch, making it the first grilled meat of the season. It was still too chilly to eat outdoors, but just smelling grilled meat on a sunny day, the smoke wafting up lazily into a cloudless blue sky, was inspirational.

I finally learned, by the way, that “cabbage sausages” aren’t a vegetarian thing; I’d been operating on that assumption for as long as I’ve lived here, but Søren informed us that cabbage sausage, kålpølse, is just a particular kind of seasoned beef-pork sausage that is typically eaten with cabbage. It’s a southern Jutland thing, apparently. They’re delicious, so I’m sad that my mistaken aversion to them cost me years of grillable pleasure, but I don’t feel too badly about my error: the third sentence of the Danish Wikipedia article on kålpølse points out that cabbage sausage contain no sausage. And Trine seemed just as surprised as I was to learn that cabbage sausage were made of meat.

After lunch we took a long walk, and I was able to get some very nice pictures of the area around their neighborhood of Allerød.

Molli had to work that afternoon, so she wasn’t with us, but you can see Trine and Maddie in the center of the photo above, with Søren behind and to the right of them, and Holger ahead and to the right of all three. Way up in the tunnel are Bodil, Dagmar, and little Harald.

Here come the beautiful landscapes (Maddie really wanted to paint some of these pictures, but said the trees had too many branches)…

That’s not actually a pond, I don’t think, but a flooded field, and it was the stillest water I’d ever seen, as you can tell by its perfect reflectiveness.

I love these pictures. Trine thought they’d make fantastic puzzles, and I think she’s right.

The mist you see in the distance in the next photo was like a living thing:

We had to walk alongside that field for about a quarter mile, and as we walked the path parallel to that fence, the fog crept closer and closer toward us, erasing the field completely without ever rising above knee height.

The next pictures were actually a school assignment of Molli’s: I don’t remember the specific assignment, but it was something to do with a visual representation of “two worlds.” Molli wanted to visualize the lockdown rules (represented by Maddie in a facemask) holding her back from ordinary affection and closeness (represented by Trine and I holding each other affectionately). I had about a dozen of these photos in my phone, and don’t remember which one she chose, so I’ve included only the first and the last (in which she broke completely).

Speaking of school assignments, here’s a little math homework underway. There aren’t many pictures of me from our daily life, so I’ll take it.

The house on Søndergårdsvej began to emerge.

Walks with Didi in Hareskov continued to help preserve my mental health during this period of working at my desk in the basement 10-12 hours per day.

Notice that paw clutching the stick? It’s because I was using my free hand to try and draw it away from her while I took the picture.

On the weekend of my birthday, Mormor threw a very nice birthday dinner for me.

I didn’t get any people photos that day, alas, just a video of everyone singing happy birthday to me, but it’s only about nine seconds long and the iPhone insists on showing it in portrait mode even thought I shot it in landscape, so we’ll just skip it.

My birthday fell on a Monday this year. We didn’t make a big deal of it. Only after I’d finally gotten into bed did I realize I hadn’t done my traditional birthday self portrait, so I just took a couple of selfies and we’ll leave it at that: here I am at 56:

(Nana remarked on my birthday that she was a grandmother at my age. I don’t think she meant it unkindly, but it certainly stung!)

The one way signs are still up around the lake, even though there are barely any cases in Furesø and they haven’t been on an upward trend for months.

I don’t know why I like the next photo some much. Something about the composition, I guess. (Hareskov, on a romp with Didi.)

And now the new house is really beginning to take shape!

We’re already up to Easter vacation, now: the girls had the whole week before Easter off, and Trine and I had the Maundy Thursday through “Second Easter Day” off. Ordinarily the girls would have been at the tournament in Holstebro (out on Jylland) for Easter weekend. This year, surprisingly enough, we spent the entire week at home.

I did take advantage of what seemed like tolerable weather one afternoon to do my 32-kilometer bike route, and I allowed myself the diversion of stopping by the windmill in Ganløse for an apple break.

The Friday of Easter weekend we had an Easter lunch down at Mormor’s, and this time I made damn sure to get some people pictures.

We actually had some social plans for Easter weekend, but they all fell through due to illness (among others, not us).

The Monday after Easter we woke up to a snowstorm.

(Worse: it wouldn’t be the last of the month.)

This is how winter’s reluctance to leave made me feel:

Ha ha, no it’s not. Trine needed a picture of someone having a stress headache for some promotional material she was putting together. Do you like what five months without a haircut looks like on me?

And it’s not just Denmark enjoying this extended winter: our friend Lisa wrote from Poland, with some exasperation, “What is this, Indian Winter?!”

That’s a bingo.

Here’s the annual shot of the house in its Easter glory (although in this picture the “Easter glory” is mostly on the window sill at the far end of the picture):

And now here’s a dumb picture of a dull moment: I’ve found that when I look back through this blog, I like seeing how we’ve had the various rooms of the house configured at different times of our life, so I thought I’d include this one for the permanent record:

…along with a shot of Didi doing what she does most of the time:

And although it’s very sad, I feel the need to note that we lost Winnie this month.

She was a wonderful dog beloved by everyone who knew her. She had a long, rich life, and was a loving companion to Nana and Pop Pop. She will be missed very much. It’s a comfort to think of Rags and Dooly greeting her in Dog Heaven.

Allowing a respectful moment for memories of Winnie, we finally move along to the last series from this period: photos from a shoot we took at Liberty Fysioterapi for Trine to use in marketing materials (brochures, website, and so on).

I no longer remember which particular pictures ended up being used, or slated for use, but just thought it was fun to have some pictures of Trine doing that voodoo that she do so well.

(And Maddie doing very well in her role as a patient.)

(Those last three shots represent a biofeedback session.)

That was it. The totality of our March and early April.

I’m putting this post together on Aunt Deb’s birthday, April 11: this morning we were once again smacked around with a couple of hours of snow squalls. The forecast is for continuing overnight frosts through at least next weekend.

Tomorrow the girls will both be going back to school at their respective educational institutions for the first time since December 3. They’re both on a weekly alternating schedule of in-school at at-home learning: this week at school, next week at home, and so on.

I continue working from home and haven’t even been given a hint of when I might be allowed to return to the office.

Molli Malou is now signed up for the Danish equivalent of Driver’s Ed. Her classes don’t begin until this summer, fortunately: it gives her parents a chance to recover from the shock of her actually being old enough to sit behind the wheel of a car.

On the plus side, at least the sun is now up even when I go out for my 6:00 bike rides, and there’s still light in the sky as late as 20:00 in the evening. That’s been the most positive environmental development of the past six weeks. And I’m grateful. But I’d be even more grateful if the Danish sun would remember that light is only one of its functions. Warm us, you goddamn gaseous ball of fire. Warm us!

(I’m not rooting for global warming. I’m rooting for Danish warming.)

And that’s really it.

Here’s hoping that by the time I publish the next post the kids are back in school and I’m back at work and the world is wide open again. And we’ve been hit by an unforeseen change in the weather and are running around in our bathing suits.