Sunrise-Sunset

I didn’t realize how fast we loose daylight until I start checking this information in a newspaper. Just on Saturday the sunrise was at 9:16 with sunset at 17:06, and today, three days later, we had the sunrise at 9:32 with promised sunset at 16:50, which means that we lost full 32 minutes of daylight in less than a week. Everybody has harder time to get up in the mornings and the weather is gloomy: grey and rainy. On the bright side, it isn’t cold, the temperature haven’t dropped lower than -5 C.

With darkness creeping in everything connected with the Sun, light acquire special meaning. I found myself collecting Icelandic words with this root. Here is the word “sólaruprás”, where you can easily distinguish universal “solar” + “up” + modified but still recognizable “raise”; sunset seems to have two words “sólarlag” found in the newspaper and “sólsetur” found in the dictionary and then there is beautiful “sólarljós”, which is sunlight, with “ljós” being light, brightness. Surprisingly daylight will be “dagsbirta”, completely different root. And, the biggest surprise of all on my treasure hunt is “ljósmóðir” – a midwife, mother of light literally.