Two years ago…
posted in Alaska, The Move |…OmegaDotter and I were boarding an airplane with two cats and three turtles (very carefully packaged turtles), on our way up to Alaska.
Then we spent a month in The Shoebox. We bought the first house we possibly could, just to get out of The Shoebox (okay, it was also very cute, bigger than our old house, didn’t need work, had an acre of land…). I managed to think I was dying of a heart attack, and spent a few days in the hospital. The dotter started kindergarten. We moved into the new house.
I missed Arizona. But we settled in, and life went on.
Here we are, two years later. OmegaDotter is now 7-1/2 years old, a very different young lady than the little girl she was when we moved. OmegaDad has totally revamped the back yard and I have been informed by our next-door neighbor (she-who-works-80-hours-a-week-at-three-jobs) that our back yard is the envy of the neighborhood. I’ve survived two winters of darkness, and OmegaDad has survived two summers of The Gloaming.
It’s astonishing how quickly the time has passed.
Today, I picked the dotter up early from her summer camp, right after her gymnastics class, and we motored up to Small Alaska Town to go to the farmers’ market-cum-festival that SAT holds on Fridays in summertime. There were fresh, ripe strawberries, and freshly-shelled peas, both of which found their way into a bag in our car. Then we went daytripping up the Kmik River. The river is wall-to-wall water, rushing and pouring and dancing down to the inlet, higher than we have ever seen it before.
We went up to a bridge that crosses Glacial Creek, which pours out from Small Glacier and tumbles down the mountainside to join the Kmik. The creek, too, was higher than we’ve ever seen it before, a torrent of glacial “flour” rampaging underneath the bridge from pylon to pylon. We clambered down to the edge and walked down the creek, seeing evidence that it had been even higher just a few days ago. The sun–which had been hiding away for a few hours–popped out while we were there, and everything was bright and sunny and beautiful.
On our way back home, we passed a roadside stand selling fresh raspberries. They had two kinds–ordinary red raspberries, and the most wonderful, sweet, juicy golden raspberries. A pint of each also found their way into the car.
It’s still July. But we saw oodles of alders whose leaves were already turning yellow, and The Gloaming is almost over–we actually need the lights on at midnight, now that we have “nautical twilight” back again. Notices of registration periods are arriving in our mailbox…school, dance, gymnastics. Autumn is whirling down on us, too soon for me, and within a few months we will have snow.
