Snow is better than slud

Snow is a lot better than slud [sloohð], and that's a fact. (Watch out for the soft d at the end there. Sounds like an "l" but with the tongue touching your bottom teeth.) Slud is, I guess, sleet, though it's hard for me to confirm because I haven't lived anywhere prone to sleeting in 15 years and these things are easily erased by season after season of California sunshine.

Happily, there was, recently, quite a lot of California sunshine in my life. I hadn't been back in two years. It felt less like home than I remembered. Or, truer, I felt less like its native daughter. I couldn't remember how to get anywhere! Neighborhoods appeared between the hills like unknown lands. Things looked like I remembered, but more, or less, real. I took the dialect quiz in the New York Times (here's the link) and a lot of those random, self-defining signifiers looked familiar to me, but I had no idea which one actually fit. Sometimes, I do use "y'all" but not in all situations, and less than when I first moved to Europe--at which point I used it more, to reinforce my personal identity as an American / Austinite. Coke? Pop? Soda? I don't know. The first day I was back in SF, my friends told me I looked "Euro". What does it mean? I remember thinking, some years ago, that it had something to do with cheesy club culture and fake zippers. But now? When I moved to Denmark, none of my clothes seemed right. None were waterproof, for one thing. But now, going back to SF, again--nothing was right. Skirt, the wrong length. Tights and boots instead of no socks and sneakers. Everything too warm, or wrong for layering. Also, recently, my California driver's license expired, and you know, I can't get a new one unless I'm living in the States. I do have a driver's license, I got it in Switzerland (in the nick of time) and it never expires, so that's cool. Probably sometime I should transfer it to Denmark, since I live here now. But the point, of course, is that without realizing it, I'm slowly letting go of many of the American, or Californian, or even Texan signifiers that were formerly and unthinkingly a part of my behavior, speech, and wardrobe. Even the term "letting go" implies too much awareness of the process. I am losing them, they are leaving me, as I grope for the simplest words and find myself saying things out loud that I've only read in books or articles during the last four years.

Sense of self, as it turns out, is a moving target.
Fortunately, the beach was just as I remembered it.

return

At some point, I woke up. My first night of sleep back in Denmark, and clearly I had failed miserably; I could hear a man laughing in a nearby apartment. Andrew seemed to be sleeping. Had I only managed two or three hours of sleep? No light came in through the curtain. But then, and I don't think I closed my eyes, Andrew's alarm went off -- it was nearly 8, and I had, in fact, slept through the night, though it had been impossible to tell because of the darkness lingering outside.

Greenland.