Can you feel it all come down?

I stepped outside to begin my walk to work and immediately paused to listen. One month's worth of snow was creaking, randomly shifting, not unlike a house ten years after construction still settling into its foundation. The rise of about five degrees Celsius pushed the thermometer over the freezing point and is slowly turning this Nordic winter wonderland into a sloppy, slippery mess.

Swedes love to talk about the weather; that's what I've been told. I find this to be a universal Truth. What the sky does can make or break a day regardless of where you live. And I'll be the first one to break the ice (sorry) with some general chitchat about how it snowed so much that the angels floated down from heaven and fell asleep on our lawn. It's just that the words, på Svenska, aren't quite coming to me yet. Weather words have proven to be some of the hardest for me to pronounce or get a grasp on. Here, you have a try:

Regnig means rainy but I can't roll an "r" and that means I'm fucked for a ton of "r" words.

Snöig means snowy. When I hear others say it it sounds so easy like a lot of other words I have no trouble with. But then I open my mouth and, like the floor upon which gray slush melts off of my boots, it's a mess.

Not weather related, but this was just brought to my attention: jordgubbe means strawberry, which I knew. But, if you translate jord and gubbe separately jord means earth and gubbe means old man. Earthman. Are you hungry? I have a lot to learn or a lot of questions I should just keep to myself.

Eventually my mouth will form around these certain difficult sounds and more and more pieces of this puzzle with fall into place, at least that's what everyone keeps telling me. Wednesday I begin my Swedish for Immigrants class which stands as one of the biggest, most sided and oddly shaped puzzle pieces: people from around the globe with staggeringly different educational backgrounds and obviously any number of mother tongues all working towards a singular goal...to talk about the weather.