Thing 9: Winter in the Northpost

Winter in the North She makes an ice stew for breakfast and serves it in a porcelain bowl while wicked winter wind whips through windowpanes loosely glazed. The further north you go it seems the further north there is to serve as a point of reference, to make it seem less cold. Though I feel a chill in my bones, it is colder in Trondheim, and in Trondheim it is warmer than in Tromsø (the south of the North) where when speak of up north they mean Hammerfest and beyond. Hammer festers will begrudgingly admit they reside to the south of Longyearbyen, where no one thinks they live south of anywhere, except for the North Pole. While there is no permafrost in Hammerfest, Longyearbyen has plenty of tundra. Students there carry firearms in case of polar bear attack. Mørktid is long and to work in the coal mines there one must have a good work ethic and a sense of irony. Begrudge them not their sealskin boots, Southerners. While -5° Celsius is cold in Bergen, back home in Chicago, it is currently -16° Celsius, which is balmy in comparison to the -35° Celsius in Jyvaskyla. That is quite cold. At the North Pole, the instruments are frosted over. Who knows? Not so bad here, not so bad. Tend to your glassy pavement. The oldsters slip and fall, crack and break, walk no more. The glaciers are melting, the polar cap shrinks, and polar bears living in zoos in warm climates turn green from the algae that grows in their translucent hair. Someday we will miss long cold nights and things that stay frozen year-round. Nevertheless, on mornings like this I feel that Eliot was a well-insulated dope. April has nothing on February for cruelty.