The season is Brumalia, the ancient Roman word for the period of short days leading up to the Winter Solstice. You'd think it would be appropriately dark and misty and gloomy, here in the temperate zone of the Northern Hemisphere. But the reality is that at least where I live, there are many days in winter that are brilliantly sunny and dry. You'd think this would be welcome, but it has its problems, at least for me. The sun is lower on the horizon during the winter months, and that means that in the afternoon, it shines directly into my west-facing home studio windows. For the twelve years that I have occupied this place, this means that on sunny winter afternoons, I can't work at my home studio because the sunlight is right in my face. I have tried sun-blocking or reflecting curtains, but this doesn't seem to stop the problem because any gap in or around the curtain still shines those bright beams into my eyes. In fact, one of the reasons I took my current day job is because I was getting nothing done during the daytime in the winter, so I might as well make signs for Trader Joe's in a windowless back room. The store, however, is also flooded with that low-angled sunlight on these relentless sunny winter afternoons. I had a conversation with a customer who struggled to pick out her organic tomatoes against the blazing Solstice sunlight. Her sentiments were the same as mine, seasonal and ironic: why should dark winter be so sun-bright?

My plants in the window area like the sun, and my brave little cactus is still in bloom, as are some of my aloe plants (the flowers are too ugly to show here). During these weeks, my apartment resembles that Pharaonic rock-cut tomb of ancient Egypt which was designed so that the sunlight only reaches the interior on the winter solstice. Low-angled beams of golden photons show every bit of dust and fiber on my floor, and enter into a closet and a bathroom which in any other month of the year is mercifully dim. There are some places which should not be brightly lit, lest too much be seen.

I have gone back to my embarrassingly simple middle-school physics text to review things I first studied in 2002. Sure, if I were that boy genius on his way to being a "real" physicist, I would already be studying quantum mechanics. But in my circling, elliptical, solstitial way, I need to review things over and over again in order to keep them fresh in my memory. I looked again at my notes from 2002 about acceleration and distance and scalars and vectors. Now that I am beginning calculus I see the presence of time and change in those acceleration formulas. I have also been pondering the formula for distance covered while accelerating, which is closely related, but not identical to the formula for the sum of an arithmetic sequence. Or perhaps it is identical at least in some situations; I can't quite figure it out. I will be reviewing vectors next. I need to make sure I know my speed and direction at the same time.

Posted at 3:16 am | link