Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Swedish September is colder than New England’s but has (until September 21) longer days–and its gardens still glow.

Late English roses, sweet-smelling Nicotiana.

Old-fashioned apple trees dropping small ruddy-streaked fruit.

Local Swedish berries with new shapes and colors and tastes.

I will be in Sweden now until December, so I look forward to living in depth a whole new kind of autumn.

Rumor has it that quarks and gluons abound in the cities of Sweden.

So, given that 2007 – 2008 is Frank’s sabbatical year, we’re headed to Stockholm (and Uppsala) for the fall term. Frank will be doing research and writing while finishing up a couple of books in progress. I will be boning up on philosophies of science in general and Nobel history in particular for my book Meta-Physics: Lives With, About, and Sometimes After the Cosmos.

Our plane leaves Boston tonight, which I hope excuses some of the recent silence on this blog.

The Swedish tradition of “Sankta Lucia” fights back against midwinter blues.

My dad used to play and sing for us “Santa Lucia” — his English translation of the Italian original was full of “balmy breezes” and Neapolitan sailors. The Swedish carol is sung to the same tune but with much, much more midwinter-appropriate words, I discovered from Sweden’s English news service:

The night goes with heavy steps around farm and cottage; round the earth the sun has forsaken, the shadows are brooding. There in our darkened house, stands with lighted candles Saint Lucia, Saint Lucia. The night passes, large and mute now one hears wings in every silent room whispers as if from wings. See, on our threshold stands white-clad with candles in her hair Saint Lucia, Saint Lucia. The darkness shall soon depart from the earth’s valleys then she speaks a wonderful word to us. The day shall be born anew Rising from the rosy sky. Saint Lucia, Saint Lucia.

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p.s. Santa Lucia arrives on December 13, but I’m just getting around to blogging her in anticipation of December 21, when the year’s weakest sunshine arrives at 1:35 p.m.

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…with real nostalgia, by reading a few of the 300-plus list items in “You know you’ve been in Sweden too long when“:

• Your native language has seriously deteriorated, now you begin to “eat medicine”, “open the television”, “close the lights off”, “take a beer”, ”look upon everything” and tell someone to “follow with me” or “you needn’t to!” You start to say “for 2 years ago” and expressions like “Don’t panic” creep into your everyday language.
• The fact that all of the “v’s” and the “w’s” are together in the phone directory seems right.
• The first thing you do upon entering a bank/post office/chemist etc. is to look for the queue number machine.
• You accept that you will have to queue to take a queue number.
• You sing bawdy drinking songs instead of Christmas carols.
• As a student, you accept and even enjoy getting dressed in formal wear to go to a candle-lit 3 course dinner where you will alternately bang on your table and stand on your chair singing songs in praise of alcohol each and every time you attempt to raise your fork to your mouth.
• You are concerned when the picture on the front page of the paper is not of some completely random person watering their garden or of a child holding an animal.

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