Sunlight

I dropped Chris and Maria off at Logan at about 2pm - or 14, as Chris would say. The first 14 years in Romania, plus his time in the USMC, plus almost 13 years in Norway has him pretty far removed from AM and PM at this point, and you can see him calculating when we say "Meet us at 5:30" here. I told Maria to enjoy the last 2 hours of sunlight she will see for two months and she laughed. "We sit in front of the fire and pretend it's the sun." Those who have not lived there always shudder at the though of the continued darkness, but they are quick to point out that the summer is harder.  You have to be disciplined in order to get good sleep, and this is not just a fun adventure that a tourist might enjoy for a week, like the White Nights in St. Petersburg, but May 1 - September 1, which takes its toll.

Not that everyone notices.  My son and DIL in Nome, on the other side of the Arctic Circle, have three girls, 3-12, who seem to stay up to all hours once school closes at the end of May. It's not what we would do - Tracy went to bed long before the girls did when she visited at the end of August for the Alaska State Fair - but hey, it's their life.  The consequences are theirs, and as both parents grew up mostly unsupervised (in Manila and Transylvania), they don't see things as we do. Still, it's not hard to think "Gee, maybe this nightly meltdown by Bella could have been headed off..." They still have four hours of sunlight, defined loosely, on the Bering Strait. It's why basketball and volleyball are the popular sports there. Baseball, softball, football, outdoor soccer, lacrosse - they don't tend to steer their best athletes into those sports.

There is the biathlon in Norway, a sport I deeply admire, requiring you to hold your rifle still in below-zero weather after having just skied hard for 10K - and of course the engineer-heavy Scandinavian countries have expensive snowmobiles, plus a strong habit of designated drivers so that everyone else just lets it rip...

So they still have sports, sure. Plus hunting and fishing and flying small planes where there are no good mechanics...