Posts Tagged ‘Alaska’

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

April 7, 2009

When I first started writing these posts, it was deep winter. I wrote from a comfy chair (see the post on Ed’s Chair, March 2) close to the wood stove, so I could write and stoke the stove as I went. The energy-inefficient but psyche-efficient wall of glass that looks out over the Tanana River valley was mostly dark, reflecting the cozy room back to me as I wrote.

Now the day is bright and light lingers in the northern sky past 10:30 at night, a kind of watery blue at the horizon deepening to ultramarine above us. Gradually, in the weeks to come, the darkness will bleach out of the sky altogether, leaving us with only a few hours of deep pastel sunset/sunrise and hours and hours of blissful sunlight.

Already, I can feel the drive of energy that summer brings. The people I know here feel it, too. We’ve started our long-season seeds–I have tomato plants three inches high on a shelf by my wall of glass. They’re ready to be transplanted into small yogurt containers that I spent hours drilling drain holes in last summer. I have more starts to plant as the weeks go on and we get closer to our optimal outdoor planting date, June 1.

But spring has its downside. There are people among my friends and acquaintances who are struggling now that winter is finally, inevitably passing. The snow is still good for skiing, but will be too mushy and slick soon; the roads will be subject to black ice as rain starts to fall; all the trash and horse and other manure will be emerging soon. If things aren’t well with the psyche, now is when it really shows. March is tough for us all here–we’re impatient by then. April can be delightful for some, but others fall away.

So is April the cruelest month, as Eliot suggested? Or is it cruel in that it reminds us how separated from the rhythms of the land we’ve become? Like the redpolls that flit through the willows to dive-bomb my feeder, like Mattie and Sam dozing sideways to the sun, like the swelling tips of willows ready to bud into pussywillows, we feel the urge of spring, even though it’s not quite here in the Interior. If the life we lead keeps us inside out of the breeze, the melting snow, the mud, something primal chafes. But if we can get out in the air for even a little while, perhaps that chafing can heal. Even better if we can be out in it with friends.

For me, besides my human friends with whom I’ve been working on some difficult projects lately, being outside with Mattie and Sam, feeling those partnerships renewed as we work towards our first riding day of the year–after the ice has melted from the corral and the inevitable puddles have drained through the sand–restores me to balance. Yesterday the temperature was near 60 by the hay barn, and I stood detangling Sam’s mane and his full tail. The snow, melting, fell in chunks from the greenhouse roof, and Sam would startle, then relax. He wasn’t as pushy as he usually is, and he seemed to enjoy the attention. After nearly four years, he is starting to trust me. Later I did the same for Mattie, her black coat so warm in the sun it made me sleepy.

I often tell my friends to come pet a horse when they feel weighed down. They laugh, thinking I’m joking. I’m not. There’s nothing better I know.

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Dancing in the North

April 1, 2009

Last night, the tech rehearsal at Hering Auditorium. It had been a lovely day–the air above freezing, warmer in the sun, snow glistening in the brilliant way it gets right before it truly starts to melt. Redpolls and chickadees flit through the woods, flocking in a feeding frenzy before their mating season. Sam is shedding so much that ravens swoop down to the corral to lift clumps of white hair for nests–or for play.

So, it was hard to drive to town to spend the last hours of the afternoon sitting in a dark theater watching the rehearsal, but I’m glad I did.

A tech rehearsal can be boring for anyone not rehearsing, but I love the loose quality of it. It’s the first time the backstage folks interact with the dancers and everything is fine-tuned. For Les Sylphides, there is a drop–a large canvas backdrop painted to look like a Gothic scene–in the 19th-Century sense. Two large bare trees frame a scene of a lake or tarn lined with bogs with wisps of mist rising in the moonlight. In the background, dark hills and a ruined castle or cathedral–the epitome of “the picturesque” combination of nature and antiquities, which the Romantics were so fond of. The moon, a circle of white, dominates the drop.

As I sat there, I watched the business of the rehearsal take place. Kids in leotards and sweaters sat in the theater doing homework or chatting with friends. Men, former parents who run the stage crew every year, shuffled around the stage, pointing at lights at the drop, at the floor, mulling how to light the dark scene hanging there. First a blue wash–a chilly night–then a bit of yellow, some red to warm it, and finally white along the bottom of the drop, which brought out the filmy quality of the mists–the ethereal sylphs themselves.

Finally, the dancers came on stage, still in rehearsal dress–black leotards and pink tights–and took their places. Since Saturday, they have refined their precision, and, with the backdrop, the dreamy quality of the dance has evolved. Only the principals wore full costumes, and it was lovely to see how the tulle of the dress floated with the movements and lifts of the pas de deux. I can’t wait to see the whole company filling the stage with long white tutus, transforming these kids to a Romantic ideal–and in a ballet that is pure dance, using the choreography of Fokine.

After the rehearsal–the Flower Festival pas de deux, and a lively dance to Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony choreographed by Norman Shelburne just for the company–I went back stage to talk to the graduating seniors for an article for the Fairbanks Daily News Miner’s Latitudes page. (It should be out Friday.) As one might expect, they had a wide range of feelings. For some, this will be their last dance performance, as far as they know, and they are sad to leave the home they have made for each other in the studio, but eager to go on to new challenges. One girl, planning a career in medicine like her father, said that dance had taught her to strive for perfection, even if she wasn’t perfect.

Nick Read in his blog Mindbody writes of the drive of the performer, concluding that those so driven eventually need to step away and learn to focus on the human things–family, friends, ordinary life–for their mental health. Yet some dancers, like one I talked to last night, feel they are born to dance. The boy I spoke to told me that when he first saw dance, he knew that was all he wanted to do. He flies through the air and has the entrechat six and temps de fleche or cabriole of a polished dancer. Watching him move with his long-time partner and on his own was to watch him fill the theater with joy of movement.

If you see me Saturday night after the performance, I’ll be wiping away tears. I’m long past the stage of pretending dance–and all it means to these young people and to those who watch, teach, and encourage them–doesn’t move me. These kids, and Norman and Sue who have given them the context and training to do so, are reaching for the perfection of dance. They make us believe–at least for a moment as brief as a balance en pointe–that it’s possible to come close to our dreams.

Performances are Saturday 2 and 8pm and Sunday at 2pm-for those of you in Fairbanks.

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Dancing in the North

March 31, 2009

Saturday, I sat in the studio at North Star Ballet and watched the Senior and Junior companies rehearse for their Spring Gala next weekend. The Junior Company is performing Carnival of the Animals and the Senior Company is taking on the “white ballet,” Les Sylphides.

Fifteen years ago, I performed in one of the first performances of my adult ballet career as a sylph, a member of a rag-tag corps de ballet that ranged in age from seven to forty-six. I was one of the older dancers in the performance, without the background of a young studio dancer in picking up choreography and in giving my movements over to the direction of a choreographer. I loved the lush music of Chopin, the romantic poses, the stillness of the corps, forming a gauzy backdrop to the lively movements of the prima sylphs in their solo roles. It was when I truly came to love ballet and understand its power over dancers and audiences.

The dancers at North Star are well disciplined in their technique by Norman Shelburne and Sue Perry and the Spring Gala performance is the time when the company shows off what the dancers know and offers a challenge to the senior dancers in their last company performance. The kids in the studio have all grown up together since their creative movement classes, and a few reach this time of year poised to go off and try their luck at a ballet career. This year Jarrin and Sophia, who have been partners for all these years each are in the process of auditioning and weighing their options–college or apprenticeship? The path in dance is fickle. Some, who are determined, genetically lucky, and accident-free can make a life of it. Some who might otherwise have been beautiful dancers for many years to come are derailed by injury, lack of confidence, unlucky choices, or other paths.

Watching the girls and Jarrin dance to Chopin’s romantic etudes–the sylphs floating across the floor in bourre or light frothy leaps, the “poet” leaping for joy at their beauty, beating his legs in mid air, I wanted to hold the moment. The corps was not yet perfect–they practiced staying still in their poses, the poet and his sylph missed a few steps. All were tired, but persistent. And this moment in the studio, just before the final corrections, the last stitch of the costume, when these are all still teenagers about to become for a brief time the epitome of all that’s possible for a human to be, at least in our imaginations, is the moment in dance that I love best.

Tomorrow night I’ll go to tech rehearsal and get a few comments from the seniors. Saturday I’ll go to the performance and watch them float in the lights and share the moment of joy that audience and dancers share sometimes. I’ll go back stage and hug the ones I know well and watch them wipe streaks of eyeliner from their cheeks where their tears fall. Then we’ll all go out into the night air. It will be April, finally, a hint of light lingering on the northern horizon already, a breath of the warmth to come.

If you’re in Fairbanks, the performance is at Hering Auditorium, Saturday, 2pm and 8pm and Sunday 2pm. Don’t miss it.

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

March 25, 2009

Past the equinox now and the light increases daily. By the end of April, light will begin to compress the deep dark of night to a few hours and we’ll be restless for the heady time of summer with nearly endless days and fizzy energy.

But now, we’re still firmly frozen in March; for us, it’s the cruelest month. The light brings promise of spring, but even a week ago the temperatures dropped to 30 below and we know more snow will fall. This is the month of divorces and suicides-not to be too dreary about it all. We know that other places are already past crocuses and daffodils. We start our seeds inside under shop lights or in south facing windows and hope for the best, for the garden is still covered in two feet of white stuff. Now is when hope fails some of us, when even all the love and care we can spare to others in our small community is not enough and, each March, a few drop away.

I was reminded of this yesterday when I heard the news of the death of Nick Hughes, here in Fairbanks. I first heard of him in the 80s when his father, Ted Hughes, came to the Midnight Sun Writer’s Conference as faculty. It seemed like a great coup to us young writers that we had gotten such a “presence” to come to our conference–though we also had Ray Carver, Tess Gallagher, Annie Dillard, and others who were rising at the time and are the literary establishment now. There was the usual gossip of writers’ conferences–who got special favor, a private reading, and why–but among the buzz was the astonishing news that Hughes was here in part because his son, Nick, was a Ph.D. student at the university and was working as a biologist and researcher here.

“Nick?,” I said, “of ‘Nick and the Candlestick’?” Yes, that Nick, whose mother, Sylvia Plath’s, passionate poem about his birth meant so much to me as a, then, young mother. The child that figures so prominently in what’s shocking, poignant, and fascinating in Plath’s own death. I don’t want to dwell on this; what’s been important about Nick in our midst is that he lived a life as remote as could be from all this history. Those of us in literary circles who knew of his presence among us, knew, too, that he wanted nothing to do with the literary world. For all I knew, he lived among friends, was loved, loved the plant and animal life of the Interior and the wild, expansive beauty of the landscape much as all of us do who live here. For all I knew, that and our careful mindfulness not to bring the past to him, was enough. Sadly, it wasn’t.

So, now, March drifts toward April. We look around, emerging out of winter cautiously. Who is still among us? This is the time to smile at our neighbors, to give that hug–flu or no flu–to share what we can. We remember who we’ve lost and the lessons of their lives. We live with them; we incorporate them into our vision. We plant seeds; they emerge, threadlike, vulnerable, pale; we hold them in the light and hope they grow.

(To read more about Nick Hughes, here’s a link to Dermott Cole’s column in the Fairbanks Daily News Miner http://newsminer.com/news/2009/mar/23/poet-sylvia-plaths-son-prominent-fairbanks-biologi/

and a link to Plath’s poem, “Nick and the Candlestick” < http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=178967>  )

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

March 18, 2009

Temperatures have dropped again with bitter wind–unusual combination for the Interior, but as I write this, I realize that it’s happened several times this winter. Today is St. Patrick’s Day, but not much happening here at Mattie’s Pillow. All humans here have been laid low with a flu–mild in my case–and green beer is the last thing on our menu.

The snow is still thick on the ground here and settling and hardening in the wind. Out on the Iditarod Trail, the mushers are being buffeted with winds off the Bering Strait as they cross frozen Norton Sound. Some have scratched; some have needed helicopter rescue, dogs and all. The Iditarod, since it takes place later in the year than the Yukon Quest, and as spring gradually comes earlier in the North, usually has the opposite problem. For sled dogs, bred to race full out at the coldest temperatures and with the coats to help them do this, weather below zero is best. Too much warmer than that, and they overheat and need to stop to eat snow occasionally to stay cool. But this year, with the wind and deep cold the mushers are struggling to take care of their dogs and stay healthy.

Still, the race will soon be over, if it’s not already, and the stragglers can take their time getting in, cheered along the way by the people who live in villages along the trail: Shaktoolik, Ophir, Nikolai, Nome.

Now, St. Patrick’s Day is over almost everywhere. Charlie Rose is talking about the economic situation. Tomorrow, plant tomatoes for the greenhouse, watch horses shed, believe that summer will come.

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

March 12, 2009

From here on the Ridge the sun is bright behind thin clouds. I can look out over the valley, and, over where the hill shoulders down to the river, there’s a thick spread of white cloud. “Freezing fog,” the forecast says, limited visibility. In a little while, I’ll head out to experience it myself, but, for now, I’m content to be at the kitchen table with a cup of peach ginger tea and this laptop.

Yesterday was Jeter the standard poodle’s first birthday and he e-mailed his sister Lucy and brother Kooba (the whole family has celebrity names–Lucy’s a red-head) to wish them happy birthday. For his birthday, he got two dog cookies from the fuel delivery man, a long walk, and a couple of pieces of cheese. A bath and a grooming would probably not have been a welcome present for him, though he needs it.

After sixteen years of living with our old dog, Kermit, living with a young dog is both a challenge and a joy. Though we had done plenty of research on dog breeds and, like the Obamas, had considered breeds like the Portuguese Water Dog, we still had some resistance to buying a breed dog rather than adopting a mutt like Kermit from the shelter. But when the poodle puppies showed up in the paper, we took a ride out to see them, and when the largest brown puppy lay in our arms, so mellow and sweet, there was no question. And the poodle at my feet has been a wonderful dog. He’s smart, energetic, enthusiastic to a fault, and, for the most part, eager to do what we ask him. I’m finally seeing, now, that things we ask of him are becoming routine, so there are fewer communication problems. However, in spite of his baseball player name, he’s not too keen on the game of “fetch.” He gets bored after a while and claims he can’t find the ball or the flying squirrel toy and would much rather run up the hill to see what’s happening there or go off and grab a piece of frozen horse manure to bring into the house. I think more mental challenges are in order.

I know that spring is on the way. Here, schools are on spring break. I have students coming by to see Mattie and Sam today, and our horse club will visit Tom Hart’s blacksmith shop this Saturday. The seeds arrived from Renee’s on Monday and I need to set up the shelves and lights to start the tomatoes for the greenhouse. The Iditarod is halfway over, though I’m not following it the way I did the Quest. Birds flit onto the planters on my deck, nibbling the remains of last year’s flowers, and zipping away. They still ignore the feeder we hung from the roof beam. The days are filled with light.

Still, there’s deep snow everywhere. I went out to work with Mattie yesterday, using the clicker to work on “stand” and “ears up.” Mattie is less fit at this point than Sam is, partly, I think, because she spends so much time sulking in the run-in shed while Sam is out enjoying the view in all weather. Her back doesn’t seem as muscled as his is, so I’m starting off with hand-walking, practicing “walk” and “whoa” and “ears up” all at once. As we circle her side of the corral, we end up walking through the parts where she doesn’t usually walk, and she and I both sink in to our knees. Good exercise for us both, but not very practical and a bit scary, since I know there are frozen brown piles under that snow–the ones we were planning to pick up the day the snow storm hit and that we’ll see again at snow melt in late April or early May.

This is the time of year when we feel most out of synch with the rest of the world, here in the Interior. We have spring fever–our minds wander, we think of places where there are flowers, we plan our gardens and summer training schedules-but we could be hit with snow and 20 below any day.

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

March 7, 2009

“Snow falling night falling fast oh fast…”

This line from Robert Frost’s “Desert Places” runs through my mind each fall as the first snow falls and the days get darker. There’s something I love about the breathless quality of the line and the distantly observed beauty of fast falling snow on empty fields, the quick darkening of night. It’s something we know well here, the muting of light in snowfall, in winter.

But saying this in March is a different matter. Just when we are expecting more light, when the supermarket is filled with tulips and daffodils shipped up from Mexico and California, just when we’ve ordered our seeds and are setting up our seed starting tables and grow lights, the sky flattens with dark clouds and, for three days now, a snow fine as pastry flour sifts down on roads, roofs, the backs of horses. After the past three days, the garden is a foot farther under snow. The wood stove ash we spread there a few weeks ago is deep below white. Our spirits, about to lift with the small signs of spring in Interior Alaska–dog races, ice sculptures, the return of days longer than nights—deflate. We shoveled the driveway last weekend, giddy with the thought that it might be our last major plowing. We need to do it again and more.

Yesterday, we got six to eight inches in a day. Mattie and Sam’s corral is deep with it. The fence seems ridiculously short, as if Mattie or Sam could step over the top rail–except they’d sink in the snow on either side of the fence. They are too smart to try. Besides, what’s on either side looks the same, and they only get fed on the inside. So they stay put. They have to lift their feet a bit higher to walk through the deep snow. I hope this works as a kind of de facto fitness plan, because it’s too deep to walk safely after them on one end of the longe line, and neither they nor I can see where frozen manure piles are buried–a hazard for them and for me, and I want none of us injured.

Every spring I have grand training plans for them, starting right after Christmas. Every year, my plans discount the most important factor: winter. So far since January, I’ve been defeated by short days, 40 below weather, snow, chilblains from clicker training with my gloves off, winter inertia and counterbalancing activities–and now too-deep snow. The other night, a friend said, “Well, you don’t ride much; you just hang out with your horses like they’re pets.” I don’t think she meant ill by it, but, compared to someone in California, she’s right. I ride nearly every day in summer, barring smoke or rain, but getting two horses ready for riding after the long winter months takes lots of ground work. I feel behind. So does everyone I know, except for those with access to indoor riding arenas.

Mattie is staying dry in the back of the run-in shed. She blends into the shadows there and only comes out if she thinks I have food. Sam, on the other hand, doesn’t like to be confined. He likes to see what’s coming: airplanes flying over head, snowmachines on the road, a stray dog running by, a car coming up the driveway. His whinny is the most reliable sign that we have visitors.

Yesterday, I looked out in the thick snow and saw him napping by the fence. At that point the flakes were about the size of dimes and falling fast. Sam lay curled up in the deepening snow, his chin resting on the surface of it. I opened the door and called to him. He raised his head, looked at me, and lowered it again. I dressed as fast as I could and folded up my medium weight, waterproof blanket and carried it out to him. He wasn’t shivering when I reached him, but his thick coat was full of snow and wet where the heat of his body had melted it. I haltered him and he stretched out his front feet, stood up, and shook the loose snow from his back. He was probably OK; just napping and watching the snow fall, but I put the blanket on him anyway and he seemed more relaxed. He’s still standing out in the snow, the white stuff filling the places where the blanket makes soft folds along his back. Underneath he’s dry and warm, ready to guard the place.

Frost said–I can’t guarantee I have it perfectly–he could “scare myself with my own desert places.” I’ve always taken this to mean the places within where we know the territory–it’s ours and in our imagination, after all–but we find a familiar terror there, anyway. This may be the unresolvable questions that we all carry with us, or the vast unknown that is our future. This is the time of year when these “desert places” open their vistas to us unexpectedly, just when we’re expecting to slip on into spring unscathed.

The snow is beautiful as it falls. There’s an uncharacteristic wind, sculpting it into drifts. The tracks from our cars in the unplowed driveway will be filled in by morning and the curves of drifts may spread across them. A good day for a morning of coffee with chocolate and ginger scones. I’ll sleep on that thought.

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The Post of Don Sam Incognito

March 3, 2009

Sam’s Dream

This afternoon, I went out to work with Mattie to reinforce some of the clicker training I’ve been doing with her. Now that it’s March, the sun is higher in the sky and stays out longer so that, at 2 in the afternoon, both horses are dozy and take naps in the sun.

When I got to the corral, Mattie’s halter slung over my shoulder, brushes in the grooming bag in one hand, clicker and beet pellets in my pocket, I noticed Sam stretched out flat, a white horse sleeping in the snow. He lay completely still; a thin cirrus of breath rose from his nose. Every time I see the horses sleeping like this, I have a moment of panic. As a child, I read that horses sleep standing up, which they can, and I saw horses sleeping with their legs tucked under them and chins resting on the ground. But it wasn’t till I had these two in a corral so close that it seems like part of my living room that I realized that, like us, horses need periods of deep REM sleep, totally relaxed. It’s a sign of how safe they feel in my corral, I guess, that they can sleep so vulnerably as this, though I notice that they do it one at a time, with the other usually standing watch.

I stood watching him for at least five minutes, maybe more. His breath was slow and long and I could see it rise in a mist around his head at regular intervals. His ears swiveled forward and back, as if he were listening to a rider he respected. His hooves twitched, first the back, then the front. Once, I saw his legs move as if pushing off into a collected canter. Sometimes he bobbed his head up and down slightly. Sometimes he wobbled his lips as if taking a treat or working his mouth on a bit. His eyes flickered, too; they seemed to open and close. He switched his tail.

I wondered what I was watching. I imagined he was dreaming of his former life, the training he had, the shows or exhibitions. I imagine that Sam loved his training and worked with an exacting trainer who taught him things I’ll never know about. I imagine that he misses this work, and has only tolerated those of us who’ve had him in our lives since them. Sam doesn’t suffer fools gladly, and in his eyes, we all may be fools.

I have to go through a pass-through between Sam’s and Mattie’s sides of the corral to get to Mattie, so I waited for Sam to wake up. I could have walked right by him, but he would have heard me coming and sprung to his feet. Eventually, he opened his eyes and rolled to his belly, feet tucked under him, head up to see me. I held my hand up, in the “stand” gesture, and he lay there, still drowsy, and let me walk up to him and scratch his forehead-something he usually resists. I talked to him and rubbed him on the neck, then left him, still resting, and went to see Mattie.

Things went well with Mattie. I worked on clicker training to reinforce the “ears up” command and “stand” as I groomed her with the rope slung over her withers. She was drowsy, too, a black mare in the sun. When I brushed the sun side of her, her coat felt so warm that I didn’t need my gloves. I finished by picking out her tail, using detangler, while she stood, head half-lowered, eyes half closed.

All in all a good day to be with horses.

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

March 2, 2009

Ed’s Chair

This morning, the sun was bright on the snow when I went to feed the horses. March light can be so intense; it promises warmth, but doesn’t yet deliver. Still, I can feel an inner bubbling, spring energy returning.

When I started this series of posts, it was deep winter: dark except for a few hours a day and bitter cold at 40 below. For days in January, after the holiday round of visits, feasts, gift exchanges, and as I began a semester-long sabbatical, I nested in a large comfy chair, a pillowy recliner given to me by my friend Ed. The chair faces a wall of windows that offer a southeast view from the Ridge  across the Tanana River and over the flats to the point where the Alaska Range disappears into the horizon. During the deep cold, I didn’t move from that chair except when I needed to feed horses, dogs, humans. Some nights, I even curled up in the wide arms of the chair, tilted it back and slept.

The chair came to me from Ed after a difficult period in his life. Ed is my parents’ age, a man who had been athletic and adventurous in his youth, who had come to Alaska after some unspecified difficulty to settle in for one last adventure. He loved–still does–to eat, and the confinement of winter, the encouragement of friends, and this chair allowed him to spread out in a wealth of weight. He had the kind of expansive size that’s a sign of good fortune or high rank in some cultures. In ours it’s a sign of impending disease.

Ed gave money away, and, when friends and I got involved, his money was being siphoned off by unscrupulous “friends” he had taken under his wing. He had a series of hospital stays: pneumonia, heart failure, stroke–and we contacted his children around the world. Finally, however, we were able to find him a place in the Pioneers Home, an Alaskan tradition, run on “green” principles. He’s active, happy, in love with one of the residents, though still missing things on his left side, a result of the stroke. When we were packing up his house, closing out an important part of his life, he asked me to take care of the chair, and I have. When I sit in the chair, I think of Ed, who always wanted to make life better for his friends. It’s comfortable, a good place to sit with a laptop and write.

On the other hand, now that the light is returning and temperatures hovering around zero–temperate for this time of year in the Interior–the chair feels too comfortable, a pleasant trap. I find that I have no need to move a muscle when I sit in it. I’m a person who likes to move–dance, ride, walk, fidget–and being inactive shocks my system. Outside the window, juncos and redpolls have found the bottle feeder we hung for them. They flit over, perch for seconds, a few seeds’ worth, then swoop away always on the move. Beyond them, Sam and Mattie chew the last bits of morning hay, the sun on their backs. If I get out of this chair and walk to the deck door, they’ll see me moving there and lift their heads. In a few minutes, I’ll go out with them and leave this chair.

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

February 27, 2009

Grey flannel skies today, flat light all across the sky, fine snow falling. This morning, when I went to feed the horses, flakes so fine I couldn’t see them at first, sifting down, a light dust of white on Sam’s white back, a veil of it over Mattie’s black one.

It’s warmer now and there’s more light than when I started these posts in January. Today in the Effie Kokrine class, we read a poem from Joe Enzweiler’s A Winter on Earth in which he wrote of the light on snow as “burning.” When I asked the kids what he meant, they said, maybe the snow is melting. After a few tries, I realized that the poem starts with “February 1” and, for us, that time a little over three weeks ago, when the sun first began to cast coppery light over the morning or evening snow, when it didn’t quite reach full light or make anything gleam much less melt, is distant memory. Now we’re on the ever-accelerating swoop into light that fills the days and crowds out night. In less than a month, the equinox. We’re ready to forget winter before it’s really over.

Some friends of mine have finally gotten me to sign up on Facebook.  It’s a heady feeling–conversations between people who know each other but are scattered across the world. Looking at photos of horses under palm trees or reading about the weather in Australia reminds me both how narrow my Alaskan view can seem and how exotic to others.   Joe, who is my poetry hero, has resisted technology for as long as I’ve known him. When friends visit from Outside, I often take them to his house; the Alaskan cabin-dwelling poet, a cliché, but in Joe’s case his house, his poetry, his woodworking, his rock-wall building, his conversational flights of fancy are integrated, all of a piece. But now Joe has a laptop. I’m not sure how to take this.

The light is fading from the day. I’m about to leave off writing and go out to throw hay to the horses and head to a gathering of friends with a loaf of jalapeno cornmeal bread from Lulu’s. I’m grateful for the technology that lets me write this, for you reading this–a gift to any writer.   I’m grateful, too, for the mundane chores the horses require; they ground me to things it’s easy to forget, the way we forget how the light shone on the snow only three weeks ago.

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