Date

2 July 2024 10:41:06

Location

Hackney Downs, London

Country or Territory

United Kingdom

Name

Sasha Engelmann

Satellite

NOAA-19

Radio Callsign

M6IOR

The day starts cold, gray and misty. During the satellite pass, I feel chilly in my Mom's flannel-lined denim jacket, jeans and boots. How is this the second of July, I think. In the slow-loading satellite image, the sun glints tantalisingly, catching its own reflection over the Mediterranean. I am wondering where Soph is at the moment, as they left for a two-week holiday on Sunday. I think somewhere in Croatia, soaking up sunrays and salty air. Thinking about it makes my heart hurt, both with happiness that Soph is there on holiday, but also with a feeling of deeply missing the Adriatic and especially the small bay called Zaraca, near the village Gdinj where my Baba grew up on a remote part of the island of Hvar. Is it possible to miss an atmosphere, or a weather pattern? Is it possible to be nostalgic for places, less through their material surfaces and more through their elements? Having spent so many long summers in Zaraca as a child, having climbed the windy road that goes from the bay to the sparsely populated village Gdinj, with its fig trees and olive groves, with its tunnel spiders catching impossible flecks of dew in the dry landscape and epic cumulonimbus clouds dancing over the Karst rock of the mainland, and wtih its slantwise sunlight that remains until the last drop (since the road climbs on a south-facing slope) I feel so entwined with this weather. It is perhaps easy to say on a day like this in London, as I shiver through my trousers in the first week of July. Yet I think there is something beyond the beauty of Hvar and the Adriatic Sea that I am missing so much. Maybe it's a direction I will always turn.

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