Sunday, June 26, 2011

Back in Sweden

Last night we arrived back in Sweden. The last time I came here was in December and I was looking forward to seeing what was underneath all that snow they had then. We got into the airport late, almost midnight. We had amused ourselves all evening watching six Italian women traveling with us on their first trip to Stockholm. They were in their late fifties or early sixties and I think if they had this much fun in the airports and plane, Stockholm will never be the same. We landed just before midnight and they were still chatting away and laughing, taking pictures of the sunset (I know, way too late for a sunset, but it was there) out of the plane windows and pointing at everything they saw. It was light enough to see that there was no snow (yay) and that there was a lot of water around. Really, it was like landing in Minnesota.

Leif’s father met us at the airport and drove us home. It was a strange drive. As I looked out the left side window I could see a beautiful, soft blue velvet sky with the nearly full moon shining through a veil of clouds. Straight ahead seemed like the sky just as dusk is turning to night, an odd mixture of light and dark that makes it hard to see anything clearly, yet everything is still visible. Out the right side window was a sky at sunset. Not the bright and vivid colors of the new sunset, but the muted colors of the memory of a sunset. Pinks, golds and reds stained the sky and cloud bottoms.

In Minnesota, this is the sky that happens just moments before darkness arrives and so I waited, watching for that blue darkness to suddenly drop over the colors of the clouds. Then both sides of the sky would match and night would have begun. It has to begin sometime, right? It was after midnight after all. It never happened. I kept looking from one side of the car to the other. So strange to see evening and night happening at the same time separated by what? Nothing, that I could see. Just two sides of the sky, one at sunset and the other at night, all the way to Leif’s home. Very strange indeed.

No comments:

Post a Comment