Incoherent Scribblings

North and South

One of the things I like best about living in Germany are the endless hours of sunlight in the summertime. I remember the first summer we were here I was lying in bed on the longest day of the year at about 11:30 pm and looking out of the sky light when it occurred to me that it was still basically twilight. It was a clear night and I could only see a few stars poking out because the sky wasn’t black at all; it was a lovely shade of dark blue. When I remarked on how I really liked those long daylight hours, A. told me I would remember them fondly in December.

It didn’t even take until December for me to mark his words and wistfully wish for those seemingly never-ending June days. By November I had observed one of the things that I like least about living in Germany; the endless hours of darkness in the wintertime. That first year I was taking German lessons in the afternoon and my classroom faced west. Each day I watched the sun set a little earlier and by the time class was over at 5:00 the sky was already completely black.

Though I spent the last five years in the States in the south, it wasn’t like I was completely unused to cold and dark December days. Each year my mom would complain about how she had to go to work and come home in the dark on cold Iowa days. Basketball season was synonymous with darkness and I am convinced that most of the town turned out for basketball games as much for the brightly lit gymnasium as the team. However, since Iowa is part of the “Upper Midwest” and it receives plenty of cold and snow during any given winter I never really thought too much about its relative position in the world until I came to Germany.

When I mentioned to A. that though I was used to early darkness in Iowa, I thought maybe living in Texas and Mississippi had spoiled me: What else could explain the difficulty I had that first year with those short December days?

That was when we got out the atlas. He told me to locate the part of Iowa where I was from and tell him the latitude. I stated that it was 41 degrees north. Then he told me to locate Munich and do the same; 48 degrees north. As if the mathematical difference didn’t say something, we then looked at 41 degrees north in Europe and 48 degrees north in the United States: Southern Iowa was on the same latitude as Naples, Italy, while Munich lay on the same latitude as extreme northern Minnesota! It was then that I realized that even though I thought I was from the “north,” I was really, latitudly speaking, a southerner.