Back to translating today. I’ve been pretty busy for… well, for the last couple months. My subjective conclusion is that, although Norway remains locked down fairly severely, its film and TV industry is planning on working pretty hard, pretty soon. I think it’s agreed by all the smartest people that entertainment folks are infallible harbingers of future events, like groundhogs in little sunglasses.

Yesterday’s drive to Montevideo (yes, we have a town called Montevideo in Minnesota. I take no responsibility for this. The culprits are long dead) was a cold one. I said the other day that this winter has been an old-fashioned one. By that I meant old-fashioned in terms of frequent snow and thick snow cover. It’s been atypical, however, in terms of yo-yo temperatures. On Tuesday it got up to over 40⁰ Fahrenheit. Stuff melted all over the place. On Wednesday I got into my car at 7:00 am with the temp around 4 below. It rose to about 2 below as I drove, and soared to 8 above by the time I got back to the Cities.

This wasn’t winter like the picture above (chosen mostly because it was taken in Norway). This was one of those clear, cloudless days where the heat is raptured into what I once saw described as “the tremendous heat-sink of a clear winter sky.” This is the cold of space. Alien. Merciless. Frigid as a Minneapolis Star & Tribune critic when sent one of my books to review.

These cold-weather drives put one in mind of Fridtjof Nansen – if you’re a self-dramatizer like me. The cold permeates the car’s frame overnight, and it lingers, even with the heater on full blast. It was an hour before I could take my gloves off, and longer before I could take off my Homburg (it was a funeral. Had to wear my black Homburg).

I wore my black suit with waistcoat, and a Thinsulate scarf and my lined trench coat. Thinsulate gloves too. I was still bloody cold.

I returned to Minnesota from Florida, years back, because I missed spring.

This is the measure of how much I love spring.

Spring, you owe me.