Just because it’s break-up doesn’t mean that it’s spring. Another snow this morning. By this evening, it had all melted away, but we’ve still got a lot of the winter-stuff that’s still taking its time to melt away.
Because I’m thinking a lot about my mom today. This is one of a whole bunch of candles we lit right after I got back from Spokane, two weeks after her death.
Because I’m thinking a lot about my mom today….
Well, it really got impossible to drive in and out of our driveway, so we spent a couple of hours with shovels & a borrowed ice-pick to do some major excavation work, try to hurry the opening of our driveway along. Meanwhile, we’ve gotta park on the street.
Workers from the Municipality came to cut lines in the ice to provide drainage for meltwater into the storm drain right in front of our driveway. This was welcome, because otherwise we live on lake-front property during break-up. But a couple days later, the drainage lines have grown so wide that it’ll wreck our car to drive in & out of there.
Well, duh, of course they do. But it’s not till recently that I’ve been able to see them, having suffered from edema for a good long while. I really like looking at my feet now.
Rozz tells me it’s because the exercise I’m getting is improving my circulation.
Another sign of progress, hey? Works for me.
We took a walk up to Bosco’s, the comic book place, to see if if they had V for Vendetta comics, since we’d just seen the movie. Since we brought Sweetheart along we had to take turns hanging out with her outside while the others went inside. I took the first turn, & caught a few breakup shots, like this meltwater lake in Spenard Center’s parking lot.
They had a couple of V for Vendetta comics but we didn’t buy any. I did enjoy the movie a lot more than I thought I would, & I really appreciated the story of the lesbians imprisoned/killed by the fictional fascist dictatorship, which became a key motivating story for the movie’s main characters.
I wear this pin on my hat. My brother & sister-in-law got me one of these pins for Christmas, or maybe it was my birthday, several years ago — maybe back in ’97 or ’98, because I remember telling people on a writing list I started about it, & one of them even ordered her own. (If you’re reading this, you can too: this & other great designs by William Spear of Douglas, Alaska, can be ordered through the William Spear website.) Then, during or right after a trip to the Lower 48 in 2001 (just before 9/11), it got lost somewhere. So I ordered another.
Time to remind myself of this too. Not only that we’re in that kinda situation now in this country that is being run increasingly for the benefit of the few at the expense & often to the harm of the many, but also… well… I just haven’t been writing enough lately. Not really since my mom’s death at end of November.
Not that I think it was Mom’s loss in itself that’s lessened my writing — I think I was having problems with my focus before then too. And since then, it’s been all about health health health. A good thing, surely, but on Sundays (my regular writing gig) & the Saturdays I’ve been trying to add in, I’ve done more reading of books about diabetes, the glycemic index, good fats vs. bad fats, etc. instead.
A good thing, yes. But my health requires this, too.
Last Sunday night/Monday morning, we got about 4 inches of snow. Not quite enough to shut down my workplace the next day. ;(
But since then — ah, warmth! Dare I venture to say, break-up? In earnest, this time, not the fake break-up we got in February. Warm temps by day (that is, above freezing), residential streets turned into slush & meltwater, mud-puddle water flying from people’s wheels onto one’s windshield… (as I told Rozz last night, break-up is not the time to be out of windshield washer fluid!)… yes! All the signs!
Break-up, for non-Alaskans, is an Alaska term related to but not synonymous with spring. It refers most specifically to the break-up of ice on the big rivers of Alaska — the Yukon, the Kuskokwim, the Koyukuk, etc. — & has over time come to also cover the melting of ice & snow in general. So in urban Anchorage, it’s associated less with the great thunderous grinding noises of river ice breaking up, but with the spraying noise from a car or truck moving swiftly through a huge lane-wide puddle of water.
Or the “dammit!” of the person standing at the bus stop in reach of that great arch of spraywater.
Clouds at our feet
Originally uploaded by yksin.
We were first under clouds, then in deep fog, all the way up to our friend’s place on Rabbit Creek Road & Goldenview in south Anchorage. On other days, we look down from our friend’s house to the mudflats & waters of Turnagain Arm in northern Cook Inlet; but on this day, we looked down on the clouds we’d driven up through. You’d think with a sky like this it was a hot summer evening, but it was actually early January. Anchorage, Alaska. 5 Jan 2004.
