North

I am more comfortable in the cold and wind. The bitter cold that sparks with stillness. I have this strange connection to people born and raised in the north. Margaret Atwood is my favorite author because she is unafraid of the harsh the dark. The barren has a carved beauty and a sad longing smell. People often have an ecosystem of the soul. Mine is dry, desolate, grey, but infinitely open. I don’t have small garden gnomes in my spirit. Neighbors don’t stop by for coffee after church. No one appears on the horizon like the small ants that crawl through my kitchen window. It echoes with a mandolin and violin and often tastes of salty blood drawn through cracked lips.
I love the green and peach tones that warm people carry. A southern disposition or a tropical flair. Sun has warmed them. They are unafraid or unaware of a world where the sun rising doesn’t mean heat. They embrace their passions where northern people give in to them wrenchingly. Tearing aside layers of wool to touch skin on skin. No loud macaw articulations – primal, desperate rumblings. No love spilt or lost. You simply know by the action not the plumage. Uncomfortable with emotion – we try no words for we know that words cannot describe the vast, intensity inside and around us.

Hitch

Life can shift in one day. The weatherman squawks about showers and there is blazing sunlight. Not the precipitation you expected. The last Dodge you took a ride in broke down and then exploded next to a desert highway. You kept waiting for Steven Spielberg to yell, “Cut” and a swarm of extras to congratulate you, touch up your makeup, and the lighting to dim. But you crawled out and what everyone sees in you is true. Strength isn’t always easy. So you put your thumb out and hummed a Cross Canadian song for good luck. You were not expecting to get picked up so quickly. How do you tell someone you are new - unknown, even to yourself? The open road doesn’t frighten you. Walking next to the highway feeling gravel rolling under your boots crackling with change, you are happy. You aren’t a little girl anymore and the space you fill seems an easy middle ground. You look in the visor mirror and hardly recognize the woman covered in ash. But you kind of like it. The grease monkey look suits you. These are situations that don’t come around often but you are so used to dysfunctional truckers who try and feed you pork rinds laced with bullshit.
You are thankful for the ride. Hell, you’ve had your eye on a model like this for a long time. Didn’t know it came with all the perks. But someone will have to do a little work to keep you in the cab. Door handles fit easily into your palm. So far, the music is smooth, steady and the pace slow. No destination in mind – only seconds rolling off your spine. Just the way the stranger in you likes it.

Thighs

“There are days where I hate my thighs, this little town and the whole world too.” Not a direct quote but if Montgomery Gentry was a female group this would be their song. Some mornings I get up and turn sideways in my mirror. I like my thighs then. They seem to keep my butt perky. Straight on isn’t their best angle but we have a tumultuous relationship. Female. There is no denying that. Certain days we get along fine. I enjoy their robust physicality. Small muscles tense and they are powerful. When it rains outside and I am raining inside – I want to take a knife to them. One small incision, then a few quick tugs , and out would slide the extra stuffing. After months of anatomy and physiology, I am not turned off by the idea of flesh and blood.
I have Romantic Grecian goddess thighs. They are hording all the surplus. If a famine strikes my body they will turn into the Egyptians and enslave my limbs. I stare at other women. Amazed when there is no flaring at the top of their legs. Even at a buck ten in high school, they were there. I should be happy for that. These thighs have taken me places. I have gripped the saddle on the back of a horse riding in the Tustamena Bench. They have propelled me lap after lap in the Homer pool. Enduring skin colored spandex; they have helped to push me through long forgotten dance routines. They have climbed Wolverine Peak in one afternoon and they love a good challenge. Nothing keeps these thighs down. Not diets, not dissolution, and not bad body image. When I can’t stand myself – my thighs stand up for me. Imperfect, steady and graceful. I love them for that.

Anybody out there?

Anybody. Tell me you love it or hate it. How you want me to shut up or keep speaking. I am looking for a little interaction. I am not picky. Or wait – I am picky but I still want to hear from you. Who cares what others think? Or what I think? Tell me all about it. Tell me you are at least reading this. Maybe I am just talking to the wind. I do find myself talking to the moon on my front steps way to often.

Reckless

I love Pandora. I just discovered two new bands – Reckless Kelly and the Randy Roger’s Band. I want to import about five albums onto my playlist. I already foresee large sums of money spent on new cds. Ahh, well. I have a slight music addiction and I want to hang new memories on fresh pressed songs. Too many albums have old moments tucked in the lyrics sleeves. “Snowfall,” by Reckless Kelly feels like it was written for me. Snow – there is little else that makes me crave changing my life drastically. I want to move to Butte, chop my hair, work odd jobs, drink Pabst, take up smoking Marlboro lights, and ski every day. If there are a few points in my life that I would tweak – one of those would be when I lived in Whitefish. I loved it there and I was way too cautious. I should have stayed but I was afraid of losing my past. So I hit the road back to AK - a decision that I rarely regret but in this one instance I wonder. Hiking in Glacier National Park would have been amazing.
Sharing music - I miss it. Having that person you call up when you find a song that feels like you have been singing it all along. My lab partner and I just started trading band names and it always feels like the beginning of a relationship. “Will she like Cross Canadian Ragweed?” “Will she discover that I am an utter dork and complete failure as a human being simply by listening to the lyrics of 'Jenny'?” “Will I like Wilco or hate them?” “Will this mean we are completely incompatible as friends?” I hate to say it but I often judge a person by their music. I won’t dismiss you but I will assess you.
You are always looking for that person who might show up at your front door one day and dare you to leave just as you are. With one exception: bring three of your favorite albums. That is the fantasy of my hidden romantic streak. I want a man with drive but not too structured. Who owns an unusual reliablable car/truck and who will look at life like a road trip. Who knows where we will end up? We might travel forever but we are going to have fun with every pit stop. We will sing at the top of our lungs the whole way.

Love Letters

I want a letter. Not just any letter will do. No electric bill, charitable society, or credit card application. It should be creamed colored and smooth. Soft, purposeful script with my address in black ink. The lining a burst of color - crimson, cobalt or jade – much like the sender. Peaceful cover – passionate underneath. The kind of letter that will find me rereading it on the front steps two years from now with a glass of Cycles Gladiator. It has been a long time since I have had a letter of any kind.
I have a few in a cardboard box sitting in a closet at my parents house. Most written on graphing paper with a carpenter pencil. Sawdust should have fallen out when I opened them. They were well phrased and at points longingly cryptic. Mostly they gave nothing but snapshots and self-absorption. It wasn’t all his fault. I let him go on and he was only twenty. I am sure he is different at twenty-seven.
I just want truth now with a little soft-lighting. Not too much forethought and little inhibition. No fear that what you are telling me will hurt or that it might give me power. This never ending obsession with protection is a little old. I don’t want to damage – I want to hear how the grocery store in a coast town made you think of me. A constant chess game called to a halt.
I would like sand to fall from my letter. Some beach I have never been to. Maybe a leaf or a seed. Something I can try and grow. At least the words will sprout or unlike the plants in my life – not die.

Little Sister

I lived with a girl who walked in her sleep. She was seventeen and I had never seen someone with no fear. That isn’t quite right. She had fear but I had never seen life spilling like mercury out of someone’s laugh. I walked into the Moseley Sports Center in August of 2001. I was going sea kayaking in Prince William Sound. This is a theme that would reoccur in my life. But all I could think about was getting back to Kenai and seeing the boy I had been playing tonsil hockey with all summer. He was mysterious and completely wrong for me which meant that he might as well have been rolled in chocolate. I couldn’t get enough of him.
It took ten minutes for me to realize the girl sitting next to me with the black-tipped hair was my new roommate. She was still in high school but taking college classes. Her home in Palmer was far enough away that the demigods of campus life let her take up residence in the cinder block walls of Suite 301 in South Hall. Soon to be dubbed the “hot suite” thanks in part to the impetuous nature of my roommates.
I had nor have never been as wet as the first week I spent with her. It rained everyday of our trip and when we set up our tent the first night, we had to sponge standing water out of the bottom. She sat there uncertain and slightly beaten down. I was quick to stand in and try to take charge. But keeping up with her was like herding cats. You just can’t bottle a hummingbird. I had my first taste of a little sister. We were marooned together after a storm sank one of the kayaks fifteen feet off our beach. That was the theme of our year -marooned together in this magical, dysfunctional world of Alaska Pacific University.

“Casey – no! Wait! I can’t believe you are doing this.”
“Why not?”
“You can’t go around shooting people with tampons or your dart gun.”
“I did not shoot Kyle in the nut sack.”
“You shoot him in the nut sack!?”
“No, the dart just stuck in his jeans. He is such a whiner.”
“Oh my God, Casey. You kill me”

She would answer the door in her underwear. I think Buck and Carl would knock just to see what color boy shorts she was wearing that day. My door would open at 2 am and she would tumble next to me – crowding us both into a twin bed. Her nose crinkled when she laughed. She wanted answers about love and I was too young to know that I was woefully under informed and in no position to give any opinion. But she stayed. Probably because she knew that I would have backed her up in a bar fight – if we were allowed in bars at that age.
You couldn’t help hoping that nothing would ever change her. That every risk she took, she would pull off. Flirting with the edge of disaster and laughing at herself the whole time. She would never be self-conscious or jaded. I see her almost slipping in the cafeteria line, grasping the edge of the stainless steel counter and flopping half her torso onto it. Hoisting herself back to vertical and yelling, “Don’t worry, I’m fine.” I had never seen someone make constantly stumbling look so graceful and euphoric.
She drove down to California with me a month ago. She got sunburned waiting for me and didn’t complain. She talked with me about God and I hope that these conversations go on till I am an old women. God loves her desperately and she is dancing toward him. She still laughs like the world is her own private joke but that the object of her mirth is completely worthy of the laugh. We got our rental car up to 120 miles an hour to see when the governor would kick in. It never did. But that is Casey. The governor never seems to kick in when I am with her. All my fears thin out into a fine sheen of wisdom. There are a few battle scars that make her a little less compulsive and harder. But she will always be my little sis and now that we are allowed into bars I am sure there is a fight in our future. Casey will keep twinkling and I will feel a little more alive just seeing it.