Nostalgia

In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.

I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people’s feet
Still going past me in the street.

And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?



I feel August dying. I now need an alarm if I want to wake up at 5 a.m. Just days ago, it seems, the sun awoke me, shining in through my windows. At night, I have to start my biking early, early enough that I arrive back home before the dusk grows too deep.

Robert Louis Stevenson's poem for children still calls to me. As a boy, I loved it, and it rang all too true. As a pre-teen, I had a summer curfew of 9:30 p.m. How could my mother call me into the house when it was still light out, the birds still chirping, the neighbor kids still playing? In winter, how could she wake me for school when the room was still dark?

Seattle is the farthest north of any major American city. (I don't count Anchorage and Fairbanks as major cities!) Its latitude is only a bit below that that of London, where Stevenson's young hero lived. We are closer to the summer's midnight sun than the rest of you. We are closer to winter's endless nights, the northern lights. Day and night vary more wildly in length from winter to summer to winter again. Nature has greater impact on our lives.

As a boy, I shared the same awe as primitive man, sensing the daylight dying, bit by bit, day by day, as autumn progressed. Oh, I knew all about astronomy and the tilting of the Earth's axis. I could describe all the planets to you when I was 7 years old! But on a different level of my life, it was magic. Magic. At some level, I felt the primal fear (or maybe hope, or maybe just fascination) that the sun might be leaving us, moving farther and farther away, never to return. And also felt the primal sense of joy and reassurance, each year after Christmas, when I saw the days again began to lengthen.

These are very basic emotions to us humans, and as kids we were close to our wild ancestors in feeling these emotions, closer certainly to them than our blasé, pre-occupied parents. The fairy tales of Northern Europe are full of this contrast between light and dark, sun and moon, summer and winter, the snug fireplace-lit cottage and the dark, starry, wolf-infested night. Those fairy tales capture our imaginations as kids, because we live our lives more out in the open air than do adults, closer to nature, closer to our lives as forest-dwelling tribesmen.

Feeling the days shorten once more, the air cooling as September approaches, awakens my senses again as it did when I was a young boy. At some level of my being, I again thrill as I wait for school to start, leaves to change and drop, frost to touch the clear night air, a harvest moon to shine over silent lakes and dark forests.

At another level, sadly enough, I'm now also waiting for the season's first bill for heating oil.