Solar Powered
make vitamin D while the sun shines
I grew up in a temperate rainforest in Alaska. Winter was the default mode of the land. Spring was a brief, slushy interlude on the way to a rainy, mosquito-ridden summer, which lasted until the trees abruptly dropped their leaves. By late October, everything was buried under many feet of ice and snow, and would remain so until the end of May.
As kids often do, I accepted the land of my birth as the normal and probably best way for things to be. I now realise my homeland is more exceptional than I knew, but while I have traveled much of the earth, I still believe it is the most beautiful place on it. And so probably worth enduring those long winters for.
Not that I do. It has been twenty-four years since I moved away. And though I think about returning all the time, it is not in the cards for my family. For the time being, we live in Berlin. And even though the winters here are a cakewalk compared to Alaska, I loathe them. Perhaps because I’ve grown soft. Perhaps because the lockdown winters of following a toddler around frozen sandpits, not legally allowed to go anywhere else outside the apartment, broke something in my brain. Perhaps because, while the winters here are much milder, they are also much uglier, and unrelentingly gloomy. Every single January, the Christmas markets are dismantled, leaving only the stony grey streets, dirty grey concrete buildings, bare grey-ish tree trunks, and skies completely obscured by dense grey clouds. And by February each year, I turn to my husband, and say, “We could be living in Spain! What the cr*p are we doing here?”
But I know that spring will come. And it does. And it changes everything. The streets that I only begrudgingly cycled down to get groceries, take the cat to the vet, and collect the child from daycare, are utterly transformed, from barren wind tunnels into delightful, leafy lanes. The Reynaud’s and chilblains that plague my hands the whole winter vanish without a trace. Cafes reestablish their outdoor seating areas along the pavements, whilst my family takes our lunch on a picnic blanket in some grassy patch of park. And while our days are more outdoorsy and active, I find I am merely looking forward to going to bed at the end of a busy day, rather than dying to.
Life is just better when you’re full of vitamin D, surrounded by greenery, and can comfortably wander around without wearing anything woollen. I know you can have too much of a good thing, and huge areas of the world suffer from too much sunshine, rather than too little. But as I mentioned previously, I've been tasked with enjoying life as much as possible. And there are very, very few things I enjoy half as much as when the sunshine comes back to us, after many months hidden away. So I’ve put together a mix of songs that capture this pleasurable, energising time of year. I’ve spent more time tweaking it than the other mixes so far, but have enjoyed all the extra listening, and think I’ve landed on a combination that has the correct ratio of hippies to goths, flavoured with just the right balance of ukuleles and synths. It certainly makes me very happy. And I hope, however sunny your life is or is not at the moment, it makes your day a little brighter.
As always, you can find the playlist here, and here: