23 November 2024 – A play on “bright & early,” of course, and a favourite winter-time quip of the host of the CBC early-morning radio show that I listened to for years.
He’d sign off, promising to greet us again the following morning, “Dark and early.”
What came to mind yesterday, as I walked an alley just off East Broadway & Brunswick…
is that, this time of year, “dark & early” describes both ends of the day.
It is exactly 3:53:36 p.m. — not yet 4 p.m.! — and Nomi Chi’s VMF mural (2016, the Festival‘s inaugural year) broods with extra drama in the failing light.
(I know the change is increasingly dramatic, the farther north you go. I do know this. I spent time in Inuvik, one January, and learned that the Arctic is not only the Land of the Midnight Sun, it is also the Land of the Mid-day Moon. But… now I am here, and here I am now, and this is what I notice, in my here-and-now.)
WALKING WOMAN 
Mary C
/ 23 November 2024It gets dark TOO EARLY! I’m ready for dinner before 5 and by 7 I think
it should be bed time!!
icelandpenny
/ 23 November 2024I know! Somehow it discombobbles me more than year than in previous years & I don’t know why. But, if this comforts you, we have it worse in Vancouver than you do in TO: at Solstice, we have about an hour less of daylight than you do.
Lynette d'Arty-Cross
/ 23 November 2024I remember the mid-day moon very well, accompanied by a crackling, still cold that can’t be replicated anywhere except in the Arctic (or Antarctic). I wouldn’t want to do it again but I’m glad I experienced it. Cheers.
icelandpenny
/ 23 November 2024Of course you know it very well indeed! I was in Inuvik in 1991 for the Sunrise Festival, and later wrote about it for Equinox Magazine. That “crackling, still cold” you describe is also a phenomenon of bitter prairie winters (or Calgary, at -40, which I experienced). Painter William Kurelek caught that quality in his paintings of prairie winters — to see examples, click on this post featuring them in this (alas, now-gone) blog : https://ocanadablog.com/2018/01/13/william-kurelek-and-winter-on-the-prairie/
Lynette d'Arty-Cross
/ 23 November 2024I actually commented back in 2018 on the post in your link. I had forgotten about him until you brought him to my notice again.
Lynette d'Arty-Cross
/ 23 November 2024I hit send before I intended to: he certainly did capture the prairies extremely well. I have lived in both Lethbridge and Medicine Hat and experienced their prairie winters. There wasn’t much difference in winter temperatures between them and the more southerly parts of NWT, for sure. More recently they have both been much warmer in winter, a result of climate change, in my little opinion.
icelandpenny
/ 23 November 2024Yes, the effects of climate change… What I like best about your description of the intense cold is its stillness: “crackling, still cold.” It is locked-in, somehow, frozen metaphorically as well as literally. That’s what struck me most, my first winters here in Vancouver — the sense that there is always motion, everything continues to breathe and to pulse.
Lynette d'Arty-Cross
/ 24 November 2024I agree, Penny. Cold and how it behaves are so different here. It does move, pulse, breathe and I also find that it hesitates. Or maybe it’s me. I have the freedom to move, pulse, breathe and hesitate in the southern cold. It’s more forgiving.
Rio
/ 24 November 2024I think I notice it more myself these days! But perhaps only as much as I noticed the change of light as a child. As an adult I seemed to only notice the curve and tilt of the planet in very begrudging way. Busy. Tired. Working in the city.
Yes, definitely. I have a clear memory of walking home as a child from perhaps from a friend’s after school, or after staying late for some reason, and admiring the sun’s last red reach across the snow covered yard. It seemed to cling to the roofs of the bungalows till I got to my home in Scarborough.
I have been to the equator this time of year and I like the winter here better. There the sun just drops, bang! Slam!