Nordåsvannet

With my computer sitting on the windowsill I'm watching the sun rise over the Nordåsvann. In this part of Norge the word vann, which also means water such as you drink from a glass, refers to lakes big enough to be worth putting a boat on as well as inlets of the sea connected by a small opening that widen up inland. The later is the case with Nordåsvannet. And, at it's mouth, this place where the water flows rapidly in and out at the changing of the tide is called a straum. This word you might recognize from it's English cognate stream. When you think of a stream like a creek the sense is perhaps not there as much as when you think of stream as a flow like in "stream of concisous" for example. In the Deutsch cognate Strom we find that in addition to refering to the flowing water, the word has moved out through the water mill to refer to the power it once generated but that is now often generated by other means and transported as electricity. Last month in Stockholm outside the royal palace we saw guys in waders salmon fishing in the ström there. It is a word well preserved in the Germanic family of languages. Further back on the Indo-European tree the word supposedly has cognates in the Slavic and Hellenic branches but I have not met them yet.

Now the odd thing is as the bright orange of sunrise ends it seems almost to darken here as the sun passes low across the sky and fails to rise above the height of the mountains to the southeast of me. Swans and ducks swimming by disurb the otherwise flat as glass surface of the water which reflects perfectly the clouds, and trees, and mountains nearby. Down at the water's edge I can tell that it's low tide because we have a small beach that is submerged when the tide is high. The air is crisp and a dusting of snow remains on the grass now hardened to ice, yet still I envy the birds swimming across the water, the ducks diving down to find some morsel among the reeds. The water is no doubt much warmer than the air, connected as it is to the North Sea. Resisting the temptation to Wim Hof it out into the Nordåsvann will not last many days here I think.

By late morning though the sun has crested the mountains and stands somewhere in the southern sky, although I know not precisely where because the clouds have rolled back in.