Monday, April 26, 2010

The usual April

Today I'm going to write in English for a change. Lately I seem to be in an Estonian thinking mode, I suppose these phases come and go. The current weather here is something we up in the north would call summer, but here it's spring - it's good to be in spring at last. Funny how in spite of the actual temperature, what seems to matter more is actually what's going on in the nature. So even though Spanish spring is Estonian summer and Spanish winter is Estonian spring, the Spanish seasons still feel like winter and spring to me, even though I'm accustomed to seeing such weather during other seasons. As little as there is of trees and other nature around here, it's still the primary indicator of the time of the year.

And now it's spring with all its usual restlessness and little surprises and life beginning to flow. Every year it's different, but still there's a connecting thread running through the springs - 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007,... it's a spiral, every year you end up in the same place, only it's not really the same, you go through the same phases again and again and again, and it's always the same and it's never the same.

I feel the doors opening more fully and a fresh breeze bringing smells of summer, rain and sunshine, Estonia. It's strange to find myself missing the place I wanted to get away from nearly all my life. Perhaps not so much for the place as for the people - and that's the really bizarre part, because until quite recently I didn't even believe I could find anyone there who I could relate to on a deeper level. Or well, with a few rare exceptions, but... ah yes, of course. The exception. Maybe I'm just generalising my looking forward to a few meetings to the entire country at the moment. And then again, I suspect that for most of us, the presence or absence of a few special people in a place matters more than what the rest of the population does. As long as the rest of the population doesn't do something like genocide with us being in the "wrong" ethnic group, of course. (In which case I suspect it'd make sense to get those special people and make a quick change of location while the crowd hasn't quite got too close with the torches.)

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