Monday 2 February 2004

Pic of the day: Took this picture before the weekend, while it was still snowy.

A memory revisited

Yesterday was the first mild day after weeks of frost. Actually only a few days (and nights) have been truly ice cold. Most of the time it has been around the freezing point or just below. But yesterday was mild enough that the snow melted rapidly in the light rain. Today only a wet fog fills the air, but snow and ice still turn to water and flow away. The sound of dripping and running water all around me reminds me vividly of spring.

It was one such day, only later in the spring, that gave me my first memory of self-awareness. I was already six, so I must have been at least somewhat self-aware and reflected well before that. But for some reason my early memories are not just few and far between; they are almost exclusively about things around me, not my own thoughts. But this was both. I can remember the melting snow and ice, the wonder of spring that I was finally beginning to understand happened once a year. And I realized that this was also the last time I would be free to enjoy it. After the summer I would start school. After I finished school I would get a job. And after I finished work, I would die. (In all fairness, this was in 1965; I think Norway got Social Security in 1967. Certainly farmers in their 70es worked as much as they could throughout my childhood.)

Well, I'm not dead yet, thank God. But neither have I had many springs just playing in the snow since that day. On the bright side, my work these days is a lot less demanding than for the farmers of 1965. Two days off each week, that's pretty phat. I believe I can remember when our school switched to 5-days weeks instead of 6-days. No, seriously. Even schools did not have Saturday off, and I vaguely remember that time. Although I think I only went to school 3 days a week at the time ... I was pretty small.

Even later, during the past decade or so we Norwegians have got a fifth week of paid vacation. Ironically, people then proceeded to work that much more overtime. Despite all the pretty words about time instead of money, people prefer money in practice. Well, I don't, obviously, but then again I'm strange. And evidently I have been that way since I was barely six.