{"id":176410832,"date":"2013-03-25T15:02:00","date_gmt":"2013-03-25T15:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotidiantruth.posterous.com\/northern-alberta-night"},"modified":"2013-03-25T15:02:00","modified_gmt":"2013-03-25T15:02:00","slug":"northern-alberta-night","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adriennemichetti.com\/truth\/2013\/03\/25\/northern-alberta-night\/","title":{"rendered":"Northern Alberta Night"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Earlier (as part of my stint as this week&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/hellofrmSG\">@hellofrmSG<\/a> curator), I had a brief conversation among some peeps about the seasons, weather, and so forth. Typically, my response in a convo like this is pretty predictable:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I don&#8217;t miss the seasons.&nbsp;<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/quotidiantruth.posterous.com\/tag\/cold\">I hate winter<\/a>.&nbsp;<\/li>\n<li>I love warm weather.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>While it&#8217;s true that I can <strong>appreciate<\/strong> the seasons &#8212; I enjoyed having equal amounts of them while I lived in NYC &#8212; the fact is that in Canada, where I&#8217;m from, they are <strong>not<\/strong> equally distributed. Winter lasts from October to April some years. And I&#8217;m not talking winter like NZ winter (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.newzealand.com\/int\/feature\/new-zealand-climate-and-weather\/\">&#8220;as cold as&nbsp;-10&deg;C&#8221;<\/a>&nbsp;oh please!), I&#8217;m talking temps of -20&deg;C or colder sometimes. I have many childhood memories of -30&deg;C for weeks.<\/p>\n<p>YEAH. How does that sound, hm? Well, I&#8217;ll tell ya: <strong>flipping cold<\/strong>. I wouldn&#8217;t mind winter so much if the seasons calendar was something like this:&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>4 weeks of autumn (crunchy leaves, scarves, tights, and sipping coffee in crisp air)<\/li>\n<li>2 weeks of winter (skiing, skating, tobogganing, snow forts, okay yeah!)<\/li>\n<li>4 weeks of spring (flowers, green, pretty, nice smells, light rain)<\/li>\n<li>SUMMER for the other 42 weeks yeahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh NO MORE LAYERS, break out the sundresses all the tiiiiime woooo!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>(Canadians reading this right now are chuckling and rolling their eyes, amirite?)<\/p>\n<p>But of course my ideal climate or planet doesn&#8217;t exist (or we haven&#8217;t found it yet &#8211; I&#8217;m hoping <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Cmdr_Hadfield\">Cmdr Hadfield<\/a> is on top of that, eh?) and so the next best thing for me is to live in either a temperate or a tropical climate.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>So here I am.<\/p>\n<p>But someone in that conversation I mentioned earlier made a comment about how much they miss the long summer days in the UK where the sun doesn&#8217;t set till 10pm. And that was all it took&#8230;&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div id='gallery-1' class='gallery galleryid-176410832 gallery-columns-3 gallery-size-thumbnail'><dl class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<dt class='gallery-icon landscape'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/adriennemichetti.com\/truth\/2013\/03\/25\/northern-alberta-night\/northern-alberta-night-2\/'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" src=\"https:\/\/adriennemichetti.com\/truth\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2013\/03\/11-05_PM_sunset_Hylo-150x150.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt><\/dl>\n\t\t\t<br style='clear: both' \/>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n<p>I recalled how in Northern Alberta in the summer, the sun doesn&#8217;t fully set until past midnight. The photo above &#8212; taken while waiting for Canada Day fireworks in 2010 &#8212; says it all. (For the record, the fireworks happened 10 minutes later, and I have a photo of that too.) Long summer days in Canada are pretty effing special. I <strong>love<\/strong> them, and <strong>nothing<\/strong> nowhere else I&#8217;ve lived can compare to them.<\/p>\n<p>So: missing Northern Alberta summers. I dug up this poem (below), which I first wrote in 2009, after re-reading some of my journal entries from the summer of 2007, when the poem takes place. Reading it again tonight, I felt like it needed a wee teeny bit of editing, so I did that.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230; I&#8217;m now missing &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/quotidiantruth.posterous.com\/home\">home<\/a>&#8221; a bit&#8230; and very much looking forward to my visit this summer.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span style=\"font-size: large;\"><strong>Northern Alberta Night<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span style=\"font-size: large;\"><strong>August 2nd, 2007<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span style=\"font-size: large;\"><strong>2:35 a.m.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p2\">&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\">The moon tonight was so stunningly, arrestingly beautiful. I was&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p class=\"p4\" style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">hopelessly forced to stare.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p class=\"p2\">&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\">I was aghast and distracted<\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\">stopped in my tracks&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\">&ndash; near the train &ndash;&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\">got out of the car<\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\">just to admire that moon in awe.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p2\">&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\">How is it possible, I wondered, that the same sun&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\">that had only just set some 30 minutes before&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\">was now giving this moon its basking tangerine glow?&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p class=\"p2\">&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\">How can that sun be so near and yet so far?&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p class=\"p2\">&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\">How far does it stretch?<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 12px auto 6px auto; font-family: Helvetica,Arial,Sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; display: block;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.scribd.com\/doc\/132246478\/Northern-Alberta-Night\" title=\"View Northern Alberta Night on Scribd\" style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Northern Alberta Night<\/a><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"http:\/\/www.scribd.com\/embeds\/132246478\/content?start_page=1&amp;view_mode=scroll\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"600\" width=\"100%\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Earlier (as part of my stint as this week&#8217;s @hellofrmSG curator), I had a brief conversation among some peeps about the seasons, weather, and so forth. Typically, my response in a convo like this is pretty predictable: I don&#8217;t miss the seasons. I &#8230; <a href=\"https:\/\/adriennemichetti.com\/truth\/2013\/03\/25\/northern-alberta-night\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[322,323,324,325,326,110,327,328],"class_list":["post-176410832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-alberta","tag-moon","tag-poem","tag-poetry","tag-seasons","tag-summer","tag-sun","tag-weather"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3rl4S-bWcw0","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adriennemichetti.com\/truth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176410832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adriennemichetti.com\/truth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adriennemichetti.com\/truth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adriennemichetti.com\/truth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adriennemichetti.com\/truth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176410832"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/adriennemichetti.com\/truth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176410832\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adriennemichetti.com\/truth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176410832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adriennemichetti.com\/truth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176410832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adriennemichetti.com\/truth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176410832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}