Looking out the window this morning, I noticed a light dusting of snow on the hills near our home. It grew incredibly cold last night, the air was crisp and the mud from the earlier rainstorm had formed a small sheet of ice that crunched as I made my way to the barn to feed the horses.
The cats were on the warpath, racing through the house chasing each other. I thought perhaps they were reacting to my returning home, but now I realize that they were responding to the change they could feel in the weather. Riley, my eight year old gets snappy during the colder days as arthritis has settled deep into his bones. His growls echoed through the house any time the kittens scampered near.
Seeing the snow makes me miss Alaska (but not that much). Even though snow is beautiful when it is falling, shoveling all that snow, living in darkness for nine months out of the year became tedious.
But oh the people we met while we lived there, and the adventures we had when the weather was warmer serve to keep me in smiles.
On our “first date” (we met through a personal ad years before the Internet was even conceived) Mike presented me with an intense lecture on how to catch fish in Hidden Lake. Perhaps he thought that a Southern California girl had no knowledge how to bait a hook correctly or maybe he thought the only fish I was capable of catching came with Star-Kist label attached. But, at any rate, after his carefully prepared lecture, I finally was able to get him to relinquish one of his coveted fishing poles, I baited my hook (under his watchful eye) and cast the line out in the middle of the lake (we were in his BayRunner). I immediately snagged a fish, and as I reeled in my prize (an eighteen inch rainbow trout) the look on his face was priceless! His original bet for this fishing trip was $1.00 for the first fish and a $1.00 for the biggest fish. I had decided to make him put his money where his mouth is and upped the ante to $5.00. I was $10.00 richer after that fishing trip!
He decided then to drive to Seward (I was spending two weeks with him) and we loaded up the motor home, put the boat on the traier and drove to Seward where we launched the BayRunner out of Resurrection Bay. I admit to feeling a bit uneasy as the land vanished from sight and an Orca breached the water nearby, but other than being delighted that Alaska was on display for me, Mike didn’t seem concerned, so I tried to relax. There is just something about being in a very small boat in the middle of such vastness that unsettled me. But soon we stopped and dropped our lines. How fortunate that we dropped our bait in the middle of a school of feeding King Salmon. We hauled in enough fish to stay safely in the limit set by Fish and Wildlife. In the middle of this excitement, a shadow passed overhead and I looked up to see a Bald Eagle circling. This magnificent predator landed in the water and began to swim over to us. Color me stunned, I never thought about whether an eagle could even swim. Mike whipped out his fish knife and carefully chopped up some salmon and we tossed this sushi towards that big hooked beak.
Even in the wintertime, we shared incredible adventures. Standing in the middle of Iggi Augi and listening to the gentle chimes of the Northern Lights as they danced overhead in a kalidescope of colors overhead, stumbling onto a coven of Ptarmigans, perched on a snow covered tree. The birds resembled snowballs until we startled them into flight. Waking up in the early morning to the phone ringing as Fred our neighbor across the road informing us there was a moose on our porch. Sharing times with our friends Renamary and Vern at the Talkeetnea Lodge…
So I look up at the snow creeping closer to the hills and make a mental note to fill up the firewood catcher on the back porch, muck the horse stalls and put out clean dry straw for bedding, fill the cat beds in the hay barn with new hay and take out the stock heater and drop it in the horse trough. I also need to call the vet and get both horses’ teeth floated. I have two articles waiting for me, their deadlines looming, and hungry kitties waiting to be fed. The horses are pawing at the gate. They are eager for the warm grain mash they get as the weather turns colder. There will be time for reflections later as my critters have missed me. It is time to stop reflecting. It’s time to get busy