38

Day 38 of 100, Nordjylland, Danmark

I really, really, enjoy visiting Flemming’s father, who lives in in the northern part of the Jutland peninsula of Denmark (“Nordjylland” lends itself to the region, lingual inflection, and identity). He’s the only person I know who lives in a real rural setting, which for me is a house – as described to my city-bound-slicker family – surrounded on three sides by crop fields, and on the fourth by a pig farm. The nearest town is a few kilometres away, a structural oddity in the unbroken farming vista. It’s a bit of a departure from the kind of environments I’m used to, and a source of endless novelty.

Silences are wide here, like horizons, and lend themselves to the deep breaths one takes when released from pressure, expelling the old to look ahead for the new. When we got here at the start of the week it was freezing and drizzly, with the sun popping in sporadically before being shoved away by last of winter. But even the tempest of the transition seasons must give way at some point. Yesterday the birds made themselves heard again in the creeping warmth. This morning, nursing my tea in front of the same window I watched the thunderhead build yesterday, the morning grey broke to a clear blue (albeit still freezing) day.

Among the seedlings in the field next door, deer foraged in leisure. One hind settled by the wind break marking the field’s edge after a fashion, looking for all the world like she was basking in the sunshine.