Hillerød, Denmark
Danish winters: Grey. Drear. Heavy skies and unending gloom in the deep chill.
If i was lucky, snow. And it did, on the very first night.
Snow is a continuing novelty for this tropical tourist. As is fog. We’re presently staying in a town north of Copenhagen called Hillerød, where the graceful spires of Frederiksborg Castle, King Christian the Fourth’s magnum opus of residences, graces the horizon from the center of town. To see its grandness shrouded in fog and snow, would be one of those life-is-complete experiences.
To one who doesn’t live in reaches that suffer a lack of sunlight for half the year, there is always an upside to gloom.
Having never experienced winter in Scandinavia, I was looking forward to the murk of my first.
In My November Guest, Robert Frost’s sorrow embraces sodden pasture lanes and the bare withered tree. They are not hard to be absorbed by, when one is granted space to attend to this particular melancholy.
I have known the exquisite doldrums of late autumn in rural Denmark, and find them a lucid counterpoint to the eternal summer of our societal aspiration.
(Above pictures from my Hundred Day Diary project last year)
It is a strange thing to feel anticipation for lousy weather, especially since I arrived with a cold that would linger in it.
But in kindness, the weather gods are introducing me to a Danish winter one step at a time: This week is bone chilling frost, but in clear weather, with that golden, slanted magic that is Nordic light.
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charlene winfred 