Category Archives: post bucket

Last night, we flew over southeast Alaska on the way north and the clouds parted below us to lay out the intricate waterways of the inside passage. Glaciers snaked out of snowcapped mountains far below us and plunged into the slate gray sea. Later, we dove below glowering storm clouds into Fairbanks where a cold, spitting rain was competing with smoke from nearby wildfires to fill the evening air. The sunset glow was reddish brown and the smell of it was acrid and heavy underneath the damp. I escaped the plane, and an overly talkative seatmate, giddy with being home and apprehensive, as always, as to what this will mean this time, every time. There is so much riding on that little word. Fairbanks, as always, is less spectacular than the geography to the south, but is beautiful in her own right with her rolling hills and snaking rivers. A friend picked me up, and we made our way through the wet streets, out of town to pick up my truck from Jenny’s house.

There, in the dusk and through a sudden downpour, I met the three-day old puppies that will be the backbone of her sled dog team in two years time. Dan Kaduce, Jodi’s husband, had come to take off their dew claws earlier in the day, and was able to determine their lineage, these little squirming balls of life with tiny squished ears and unopened eyes, from their bodies, colors and facial structure. I still have so much to learn.

I made my way to Toni’s cabin, but didn’t arrive there until very late. The midnight sun is gone this late in the season, and I fumbled in the dark for the key and the lock and the lights. Exhausted from nearly twelve hours of travel after a frantic morning of preparation and last minute packing, I fell asleep seconds after my head hit the pillow in her cozy loft.

This morning I was awake with the early sun and the neighbor’s frantic dog shrieking away into the misty morning. The clouds were low and scattered but sunshine looked to be peaking through. I went on a run through our old neighborhood, struggling with the unaccustomed hills, relishing the gravel and mud and wet grass. I passed Georgina’s Pond and found that the memorial wreaths and candles are all gone now, eight years and many memories later. The black tannin water was occupied by a pair of wood ducks, paddling lazily under the encroaching marsh grasses.

At our old cabin, the little tripod I built to host the house number by the road had been torn down and the number was tacked up on a twisted black spruce tree far back from the road, almost invisible. The cabin had new lattice around the base and a large storage shed at the end of the driveway, but otherwise looked the same as it did during our five year occupancy: a generic little log structure in a typical tumbling spruce and birch forest outside of town. I plodded on down the road. At the sprint kennels, the dogs barked and yelped at my passing. A few minutes later, two elderly women pulled over in their rental car and flagged me down. They were looking for Mary Shields’ kennel for a tour, and had made a wrong turn. Their GPS wasn’t working correctly, could I tell them the way? I was thrilled to do so, thrilled to know where to direct them even though I’ve never met Mary nor been to her kennel. I realized later through my giddiness that what thrilled me was not only to be home, but to be taken for being home by strangers.

Arriving back at Toni’s, I determined that the weather is good enough for a journey out to Angel Rocks for a hike up to the huge granite tors that jut out from the topography there. It will be a nice little shake-out hike to see where I am after my attempts to get in better shape these last two months, and as always a good view from the top, even on an overcast day. I’ll run into town to get bearspray and bagels. I have been here less than twelve hours, and already I can feel my shoulders relaxing and my heart beat slowing down, my breath evening out. I am always afraid that coming back will be terrible, somehow I will find that I do not belong here, after all, in this place I have placed so much credence in, imbued with so much hope for the my future and place. But as always, coming back is as much of a homecoming as I need it to be. Somehow the indifferent forest embraces me, after all.

I’ve never been much of a music connoisseur, preferring NPR news programming to iTunes on the road or in the house. When I started running six weeks ago, I tried to play music but found the tempos incongruous with my epically slow pace. Either the beat was way too fast for my dinosaur plod or the slow music was slowing me down so much that I might as well be walking. I found a happy middle ground a couple of weeks ago. As my runs got longer, I started listening to the audiobook version of True Grit that I had gotten through audible and forgotten about. It was perfect for running, the plot was engaging enough to keep me distracted from the increasingly endless seeming intervals, Mattie’s incisive observations of the adults around her left a smile on my face every few minutes and in general I found my runs sped by faster with the book in my ears.

Two mornings ago, as I left on my run, the Audible app crashed and I was unable to get it to find my place in the book as I was walking out the door. I had a terrible run, trying to listen to Indigo Girls but feeling every step. It may have been that I was dehydrated and slightly sleep deprived, but by the end of the run I began to believe it was because I was no longer sufficiently distracted from the pain of my increasing time and mileage. This morning, I forgot to try and fix the problem until I was already out the door, but I was in no mood for any of the music I could think to accompany me. So I did something I am usually loathe to do; I ran in silence.

Long ago, when savvy music lovers were making the precarious transition from walkmans to discmans and I still considered myself a runner, I remember a particularly purist coach talking about the terrible habit of running with music. He claimed that the varying beats messed up one’s pace, and nobody listened to what their body was saying when they were listening to someone else singing through their (ear-sized, foam covered) earphones. Young and eager to please, I took him to heart. The fact that nobody could figure out how to run with a discman without it skipping helped me follow his purist mindset a little more easily, in those days.

Today, running in silence for the first time since I started this gambit, I began to wonder if there was something to his expositions on tuning into the mind and body instead of out. I found myself intensely focused on myself for the first part of that run, in particular, how I was unsure if my body was going to make it through said run in one piece without crashing. For about a third of the course, I was doubtful and negative, interpreting every little ache and pain as the beginnings of good reason to stop. And then beating myself up for the specter of failure rearing its grotesque head at the thought. Going under the railroad bridge brought my head around, and I realized what was happening. I began to wonder if what is need at this point isn’t necessarily an absence of distraction, but a focus and discipline of the mind. What I may need now is the strength to silence the negative voices and focus instead of the pleasures of the run; the sun on my cheeks and shoulders, a cool breeze kicked up suddenly, the emerald green fields of Como park stretching out below my feet, the slick of sweat on skin, Ersta’s eager nose in my hand at just the moment I’d forgotten she was there at my knee. Or focus on other things entirely, the bigger narratives, like the sermons of a devote of the road runner’s life ringing back clearly from decades ago, or a packing list for my largely unplanned trip commencing in the morning, or intentions for the rest of the day rolling out before me. Perhaps it is not the running itself I am squandering by listening to a book or a tune, but an opportunity to discipline not only the body, but the capricious mind as well.

My friend Toni rolled in to town tonight on her new motorcycle. She took a class in April back in Fairbanks, bought a bike, quit her job and left Alaska headed for the Florida keys a week and some change ago. Tonight we feasted on crab rangoon and sipped margaritas, while she regaled me with stories of people she’s met on the road south. And how she is already planning an around-the-world-trek for the near future, addicted to life on the road with just these few days’ worth of a taste. Watching her, glowing from the journey, I realized that she is a badass, and I am so happy to have her passing through my house today and as a permanent fixture in my life in general. She’s as close as family, but in the meta-narrative that runs through everything, she motivates me to dive in and grab what’s possible, from stories of her peace corps days to a recent solo journey hiking through Manchu Picchu, to this latest journey on her own road.

A couple of days ago, Jodi came off the glacier for less than twenty four hours to grab food and a real shower. She’s been up on the ice living in a tiny wall tent with one other person and forty dogs since she was forced to come down for a burst appendix last month. Thirty days on the ice, sutures fresh out, running dogs, moving camp, digging out of blizzards without so much as radio contact with the rest of the world. And when she came off the ice? Of all of her myriad friends and acquaintances and rabid fans … I was shocked and humbled that I was on the other end of that call, discussing hired help and pedicures and directions to REI to get new sunglasses.

Sitting with Toni tonight, I realized that I am surrounded by women who are bad-asses. And that I have surrounded myself with them. Terri & Andrea, Jenny & Jodi, even Aliy & Paige to a lesser extent … women who have had hard hands dealt at times, but have come out fighting, making a life for themselves and living it well and fully. And this is what I need, what I want to be surrounded by. Women who I wish to emulate, whose drive and will and ingenuity have gotten them to the places they’ve wanted to go and beyond. And I have done so, because I want to be them. I want to be the person with the courage and strength to go after my crazy dreams, no matter how implausible or impractical they seem on the ground in these days full of nursing texts and clinicals and a far too complicated life.

So with Toni sleeping upstairs tonight, her bike in the garage and road-gear in the hamper for tomorrow, I hope I can keep these friends close. To be reminded of what I am aiming for, and gather what I need from them to go after it myself. And do it well and fully, as they have done, before me.

Every time we move, we purge things from our stash. Yet every time we move, we fill up the basement with tubs and boxes of items that can’t bare to be thrown away: camping gear we may yet use, trinkets from the past that trigger memories we don’t want to lose, specialty tape, hardware and odd bits that we may just need at some point after all. Sometimes we throw away things and regret it, sooner but usually later. How many times have we decided we don’t need the deep frier, only to buy another on a whim a year later when a fish fry is the only thing that will do? And how may times have we bought something, when its twin lays unremembered in a box stacked somewhere out of the way (I’m looking at you, pancake griddle.) Pete has been bringing up a load from Iowa every weekend for the past two months, and I have been horrified as all the extra available space in this little house has slowly been filling up with the things we apparently cannot part with. There have been several trips to goodwill, and there will be more. I wrote about my own uneasy relationship with moving and purging here, on the other side of our big move from Alaska to the lower 48 in 2012.

This summer, I am struggling to wrap my mind around a new kind of waste. This one is born of cooking for two people for the last ten years, and suddenly finding myself shopping and cooking for one for most of the week. Already prone to cook too much for the two of us, I am now finding myself (no thanks to the CSA, among other things) with far too much food on hand. And especially in the heat of the summer, that food tends to go bad and quickly. I am slightly mollified knowing that the waste is at least going into the city composing program and isn’t contributing to the landfills, and yet the fact that I am contributing so much at all does not sit well with my soul. How can I buy less, so that less will go bad? How can I cook for one responsibly? Especially as I try to balance a new nutrition program that I only stick to half the time (buy chicken and broccoli, get sick of chicken and broccoli, throw bad chicken and broccoli out, feel guilty, resolve to do better, rinse, repeat) this new normal is not working for me.

Although I talk a good game about trying to be intentional in my life, I am beginning to think that I need to start acting with much more intention when it comes to the food that I bring into my home and the food waste that goes out of it. Being food-rich is something that I am loathe to take for granted, but I find myself taking it for granted anyway. I need to begin to treasure each meal, each component of each meal, and do so with more discipline and attention to detail than I have to this point. I need to be grateful, each day, that I have enough food on my table, and endeavor to be sure that it is just enough, and no more.

Moderation in all things. Amen.

The first time I encountered my neighbor, I was coming in from visiting a friend and had a slate of things to do before the afternoon got too far ahead of me. He called to me through the thick lilac bushes that border our yards and asked if we were renting, or if we’d bought the place. I peered through the leaves but couldn’t get a good look at him through the greenery except to figure out that he was in the process of digging up a stump on his side of the border. I answered and politely asked if he knew the owners, if they had ever occupied the house? I soon found myself stuck there on the other side of the bushes while he told me about the entire later part of his life, which included bicycle-touring through Myanmar and China and working as a parking lot attendant for years downtown. By the time I managed to make a smooth exit, most of the afternoon was burned away and I had an earful of adventures to ponder but no face to put with it. Also, I found out that I share my name with his wife.

Flash forward a month, and these neighbors are undertaking and enormous landscaping project by hand, tearing up the earth around the foundations of their home. The wife, covered from head to toe against the sun and listening to podcasts on her laptop balanced precariously on a rock next to her, is dismantling the current footing stone by stone and placing each fragment in a bucket. I can see her obliquely through the screen as I nibble my breakfast each morning. When I take out the recycling, we make eye contact and I have a flash of inspiration.

“Hello! Say, would you like some tomatoes? I have more than I can possibly eat!”

A thin old man, all muscle and sinew, grey beard trimmed perfect and short, emerges from behind the cover of lilac bushes by the back of the house. His cargo pants are held precariously by a belt notched as small as it can get. I can see the veins running up his lean arms from across the yard.

“Honey, would you like tomatoes?”

“Well, sure!”

I dodge back into the house to lighten my load, and return with a target bag full of the red plague, only to be regaled for nearly an hour with stories of landscaping, re-roofing and bidding on a garage while his wife listens next to us, eying her project, weighing eagerness to get back at it with politeness to her husband’s monologue and my presence. I see that she is probably from India or Bangladesh. I learn that they have been married for going on twelve years. I also learn all about how important soffits are to keep a roof from sagging, and that the peeling paint along a window behind him is from a terrible leak that occurred last spring, and that he likes to keep business “in the family.” I try not to shuffle my feet in impatience to get back to my own desperate day of cramming for final exams, or procrastinating from such a task, as the case may be. But when I finally wrench myself away, I wonder what other stories would have been forthcoming if I had been patient enough to listen for a little while longer.