Following Elias

Happy Friday

I've been exploring this mountain of ours, bushwhacking through blueberry bushes, climbing above tree-line, tromping through the tundra, scaling small cliffs, to reach the nameless peak in our backyard with views out one way to Resurrection Bay and the other towards the Harding Icefield.

 

 

My first time up, I traversed the hill on my own, only to lose my "trail" on the way back down, caught in Devils Club and along rock faces, I traveled from the height of proud accomplishment at the summit to the depth of self-ridicule as I climbed over or under yet another fallen Spruce tree in a race against time to make Olive's class's singing dedication to a new Iditarod statue in town.

All I had to do was follow the ridge line, the mountain's spine, along Spruce Creek, but somehow I wandered  off track, my lack of observation skills proving their tremendous might.

My only company my dogs, and what looked like fresh piles of bear scat, I sang and spoke aloud the whole hike, my words shifting from songs of strength to tales of woe as the woods grew darker, the rainclouds smothering the sun, heavy drops falling like reminders of my foolish pride.

I went from singing: "Love lifts us up where we belong...on a mountain side....with a clear blue sky...."

To: "I am sooooooooo stupid!"

And: "Mother fucker ice-cream cone!"

For real. Mother fucker ice-cream cone came out of my mouth.

Not sure why I felt the need to top my swearing with sugar, but strange sentiments arise when one feels desperate, and alone, in the darkening woods.

I obviously made it back down the mountain.

With even enough time to shower and eat some warm chicken soup before watching Olive sing about dog mushing under the Northern Lights.

Feeling again like a badass mountain-climbing goddess instead of a bumbling fool fighting her way through brambles in the thick of the trail-less woods.

And I climbed up again yesterday. This time with Nick, my mountain man with a mental compass, who easily led us back down the ridgeline route, through the moss and ferns, back to our trailer-home on the hill.

And I never even cursed a single dessert.

Happy Friday all!

A Crack in the Pavement

Fresh snow on Mount Alice, after another evening of rain here in Seward, a sign of the changing seasons. Rust colored leaves collect at my feet as I explore the woods I call home. Mushrooms in all shapes and sizes sprout out of the moss, clinging to fallen trees, at home in decay.

This time of year delivers a surge of melancholy upon the cool ocean winds, a longing to hold onto every shade of green, to ward off the mustard brown that arrives with fall. I want to cling to the sun, keep the great ball of fire close to earth so it can light up the sky for hours on end.

Soon we will be driving to school in the dark, unable to scan Resurrection Bay for otters, seals, and sea lions. Waking beneath the stars-- if the clouds part long enough to reveal the distant lights.

Snow will make its decent, and I will adjust to the season of little daylight, reluctantly, at first, as I gather hats and gloves and down jackets from storage, seeing what still fits my children's growing limbs, rediscovering the raw beauty of winter, until I almost forget what Alaska feels like in the heat of June.

I will look out at the grey world and be unable to imagine Lupine's particular purple, the blue of a Himalayan poppy will seem unreal, like a painting from another time, not mere months earlier, when wildflowers covered the tundra instead of frozen water turned white.

 

"There's snow on the mountains," I said to the kids this morning, as we slowly navigated the potholes on the gravel road that snakes between the bay and the cliffs from Lowell Point to town.

"Yay snow!" Olive cheered from her back seat. Skiing, sledding, forts, angels...

My girl, who yesterday, as we walked back up from the pond at the base of Tonsina Trail, after checking out the damage recent rains did to the gravel work of summer's State Park crew, the way the creek jumped the constructed rock barricade and reclaimed the path for it's own bed, washing away the small stones, pushing larger rocks downhill, proving, yet again, that wilderness will prevail, that the natural intelligence of the environment will replace man's sharp angles with curves, said: "I love the rain. It's so fun."

And on up the hill she skipped, singing Hobo Jim's "Iditarod Trail" song. 

Away up in Alaska
The state that stands alone
There’s a dog race run from Anchorage into Nome

And it’s a grueling race with a lightning pace

Where chilly winds do wail.
Beneath the northern lights, across snow and ice

It’s called the Iditarod Trail.

Oh sweet Olive--I love the rain, yay snow--at six she's not old enough to cling to past seasons, just riding her way through the changes, excited about what's next.

Elias, sitting in the front passenger seat, now that he's twelve, said: "Not snow! I'm not ready for snow. Mom, are you not ready for snow?"

"Not yet, Bud, not yet."

But snow it will-- well, at least winter will come-- and once I adjust to the shorter days and colder nights, I will want the yard to turn white over the alternative of freezing rain and ice.

I too will think: skiing, sledding, forts, angels...

I will pull on my Bogg Boots and walk these same woods, looking for paw prints, signs of the animals who share this home on the side of a mountain.

Last weekend, I startled a black bear on my run to Tonsina Point with Lola. The bear saw my dog, and splashed into the creek, running towards the beach. I saw the large bear from an angle, as it galloped away, and instead of fear, felt awe. I continued jogging in the same direction the bear ran, adrenaline giving my body the energy it lacked earlier, silently thanking the bear for the rare sighting.

"I haven't seen a bear here all summer," a kayak guide said, when I told him about the encounter, his clients hoping for a glimpse of the mighty bruin, an animal beyond the control of human design, a sign of a world beyond machines, text messages, and pumpkin spice lattes.

But I saw it.

And the river otters that swam towards, not away, from my dogs, both curious and ready to defend their tidal pool against the canine intruders.

And the immature eagle who unfolded his wings, longer than my arm span, as the dogs and I approached his perch on an old dead tree that overlooked the bay-- and off he flew, giving me the gift of the sound of an eagle soaring.

All these sightings remind me how much I can never know. Where that particular black bear slept on Saturday night... What the eagle sees upon his flight...

A whole world of knowledge untouched by mine.

I just moved from the city of Anchorage, where I spent the last 16 years-- almost as long as I lived in my hometown of Watertown Connecticut, before heading off to college in Maine-- leaving behind the comfort of a convenient community to live on the edge of wilderness, so I can understand more deeply what it means live within this world. Not separate from but with the bear scat and eagle feathers, to walk the same shore as the river otters and learn from their brave approach.

I hope to make this mountainside my permanent home, the place where my wandering soul finally rests--on the edge of two parks and yet only a few miles from the small harbor town of Seward, where I can still text friends to meet for coffee and drive my automobile through the grid-lined streets.

Near the train station in town, a white Viola blooms through a crack in the pavement; a beacon of the balance between adapting to a changing world and digging roots through the barren ground to the rich soil beneath the broken surface.

A reminder to bloom, to open our petals to the fading light, even amidst and within the brittle bones of asphalt, while trains keep  rumbling past.  

The seasons change, and yet, here I stay. 

 

On the Edge of the Playground

"Good morning birds," I said, as the kids and I trudged out of the trailer, into the not-quite light of 7:30 a.m., in September, in Alaska, and the Stellar Jays greeted us with their calls.

"That's why I don't want to go to school," Elias said, my boy who barely ate a spoonful of his cinnamon spice oatmeal, choosing to stretch and rub his eyes instead.

Its early.

"What? Why?" I asked, as I threw his canes and the kids' backpacks in the back of the Honda.

"Because of the birds."

"Ah, yeah, that makes sense."

Despite Elias's morning comments, he walks into his new middle school easily, and almost always walks out at 2:25 with a smile. "The day goes so fast," he told me yesterday. And later: "I like my school."

Olive seems more clingy than normal. Giving me lots of extra hugs at her classroom door, leaning her head against my soft belly. This morning a girl she met at Bluegrass Camp walk right past Olive without saying hello.

Its still early.

I sat in the car and watched Olive on the playground for morning recess, she stood on the side and watched other kids play. She walked around the edges. She saw a boy she knew and walked up to him but he ran towards the play equipment where some other boys waited for him. Tears welled in my eyes as I watched my daughter navigate this new land.

Its hard being the new kid in town.

And though I know she's already making friends, she's still sometimes standing on the sidelines waiting to be picked to play, her big brown eyes watching other kids move about between long time buddies with ease.

"What did you play at recess today?" I asked last night at dinner, as learning about recess often reveals so much more than what goes on in the classroom. Olive loves learning, she's a rule follower, a teacher pleaser, loves being part of a group, in the classroom she shines-- recess, well thats where the kids make the rules, and with girls especially, there is always someone left out.

The first week of school Olive told me a girl was mean to her, saying she couldn't play with another girl she met at soccer camp. "What did you do?" I asked.

"I followed them around," she answered.

Ugh. 

My stomach turned at the image of my strong-willed creative child walking a few steps behind the power girl who rejected her.

We talked about other options, finding someone else to play with, doing her own thing. In this case the older sister of the girl Olive wanted to play with came along and included my daughter.

"And then the other girl was kinda nice," Olive said.

Bleh.

Girls: I hate the passive aggressive exclusion games we somehow learn to play as children, some women never giving up the skewed social rules of leaving others out.

Last night when I asked Olive about recess, she answered, "Well I didn't really play." 

I pictured her standing, hood up like this morning, watching other kids laugh and chase and hold hands as they skipped across the playground with ease.

"What did you do?"

"I did the monkey bars." she answered.

"Well that's playing," I said, and it dawned on me that maybe to her playing is when she is interacting with other kids, part of a group, creating games, acting out parts. And I remembered her tears from Sunday night and her familiar words: Elias doesn't ever play with me. Not in the way she longs for, at least, in the realm of kid language and make believe.

"Were there other kids doing the monkey bars too?" I asked.

"Yeah," she answered, and she went on to tell me how she can now skip bars, rising from the table to demonstrate in David's kitchen before returning to her seat and happily carving her carrot with her one front tooth.

Its still so early.

I remember moving from Connecticut to Ireland, when I was five-and-a-half, a year younger than Olive is now, arriving at the end of summer before the start of school, the days still long with daylight, my brother Andrew and I watching the Irish kids play soccer in the street out of our upstairs bedroom window, so foreign to us, not knowing then that when the sabbatical year ended, and our family returned to the states, I'd be in tears as I said goodbye to my new best friends.

Olive will navigate the female friendship world, just as I did, and my Mom before me, and her mother before us, and on back through the line of women forging relationships, one with another, figuring out who to hold onto with time, and who to stop following behind.

I can't watch from the parking lot.

Sometimes I just need to start my car and drive away. Trust my daughter to swing across those bars, sometimes skipping one, sometimes falling, rising up, dusting off her scabby knees, and running to wherever her path leads next.

Our Trailer Song

"Can we listen to the trailer song?" Olive asks from her perch at the table that wobbles if you lean on it.

"Sure," I say, turning off NPR, and the doom of our current political crises, to play Old Crow Medicine Show, my children's favorite band.

Please don't tell them that this particular song choice of theirs-- especially beloved now that we live in a trailer--is really called "Bushy Mountain Conjugal Trailer" about much anticipated prison sex.

Some day, an older Olive, sitting alone in her room as a teenager, or driving her own car as a young adult on her way to a weekend camping trip with friends, will really listen to the words, and she'll put her foot on the brakes and say: "Holy shit, thats what this song is all about?!"

For now, its our "trailer song" and I find myself dancing before 7:00 a.m. on a Thursday morning as my kids eat sausage and hash browns.

"Its like you're doing a show," Olive says, and I spin around and shake my hips, arms raised above my head, unusually happy for this early in the morning, without my husband here to help the kids get ready for school.

Olive smiles up at me, not yet embarrassed by a Mom who loves to dance.

I still have some time before she rolls her eyes.

Time, that elusive shapeshifter, that stretches and shrinks, hides and reveals itself, always present, like breath, central, yet so elusive.

"What time is it?" Elias asks, multiple times a day, as if numbers can capture the rotation of the earth, the progression of night to day, always onward, like water tricking or surging downstream, forging a path towards the ocean, towards a greater depth.

It rained seven inches in less than twenty-four hours on Sunday night, and we know this because a green bucket sat empty up on our clearing on Saturday and Monday morning, after Sunday's deluge, Nick and I stuck a measuring tape into the collected rain water.

The empty bucket represented a stuck moment with Elias, one of those times when his mind wouldn't let go, like a barnacle, it sticks to an irrational thought and refuses to release-- despite a bay of reasoning, bargaining, ignoring, consoling, pleading-- forcing everyone around him to adjust.

It was Saturday evening, after our glorious helicopter-glacier-dogsled ride.

(A gift we have since talked about almost every half-hour, and unlike Elias's recycled elevator conversations, I haven't yet tired of Elias rehashing Saturday's flight.)

Still sunny and calm, Nick and I planned to burn part of one of our many slash piles of mostly Alder and Spruce.

We had attempted a fire the night before, adding dried grass and twigs, only to realize a little late that the wind gusts would make the smoke unruly. "Too windy," we told the kids. Olive pouted, disappointed she couldn't cook a hotdog on a stick.

"We don't want to catch the whole woods on fire," I might have said.

Elias sat on a bench Nick made with tree stumps, smoke obscuring his face from view. Nick dumped a bucket of water on the fire and we planned to try again on Saturday.

And here it was. Saturday. Not windy, sun sinking behind the mountains, shadows cooling the clearing, a perfect time to burn some old trees. I crumpled paper and tore up some cardboard, but Elias's lip started to quiver and he said, "We're not having a fire!"

It didn't matter what logic I delivered, he stuck to his refrain, even digging the paper and cardboard out of the pile and clutching it to his chest like a blanket.

Nick shrugged as I shook my head and bit my lower lip. "Ignore him," he offered, as my my words bounced off my boy, as if our magnetic poles weren't aligned.

"You know why I don't want a fire?" Elias said.

"Why?"

"Because it might rain," he answered, as we stood under a cloudless sky. 

The thing is, I wanted a fire.

I longed for the physical work of tossing branches into the flames and the beauty of watching them burn. The knowledge that this was a step towards building a home, something solid and real that I could do.

I grabbed the empty green bucket and walked towards our big puddle, a hole dug out with the backhoe in search of a water source that now collects and holds the rain. I leaned in and filled it as close to the top as I could; I alternated arms carrying it back up the driveway, resting every few feet to trade hands.

Water: both light and heavy, like parenthood, like emotion, like time.

"I want you to walk back and dump the water back in the puddle!" Elias said, still worked up, not letting go of his newfound fear of flames, of the smoke circling the woods, of the woods burning down.

I looked around at all our giant piles of downed trees that we need to burn this fall and thought: How can we now have a boy anxious  about smoke and flames?  And yet here he was, fretting about my bucket of dirty water, clutching cardboard and paper to his chest, eyes wild.

Even the offer of watching YouTube elevator videos in the trailer didn't pull him out of his fretting spiral.

He walked to the shed and emptied his armload of crumpled school papers and ripped box wine. He walked back to the slash pile and pulled out the tissue from a shoe box I'd thrown in with the grass and branches.

"At least he's doing something on his own," I said to Nick.

After carrying his second handful of paper back to the shed, he walked up to the green bucket and rocked it back and forth and pushed till the five gallons of water, hauled by my own hands, seeped into the rocky soil.

I walked away from my child, and his determined rigidity, to a recent patch of Alders Nick chainsawed to make room for another storage shelter, and started dragging the twenty foot trees to our biggest slash pile, choosing to haul wood over my son's anxiety, his irrational but rational fear, planted, most likely, by my own words. 

We don't want to catch the whole woods on fire.

We never did light that slash pile on Saturday night. But we did start a small fire, safely contained in our stone pit we built, so Olive could roast her hotdog and not have her desires squelched by her brother's behavior, an all too familiar scenario.

The wood crackled before us, not caring about Elias's antics an hour before. And after the physical work of dragging small trees, lifting and tossing them onto our growing pile, I cared a little less.

He had moved on, why shouldn't I?

Why not enjoy the small flames we sat around, the light on the mountains, the memory of standing on a glacier at noon, the generosity of my new community, the Dahlias and Snapdragons blooming in the background, the anticipation of corned beef cooking on David's stove...?

Why not let the invisible magic of time keep moving forward, without harboring frustration from a moment ago?

Why not wake up groggy on a Thursday morning, before the sun rises, light the flame beneath the kettle, cook hash browns and sausage, encourage my children to rise, to dress for school, to eat, and shake off my exhaustion with the sway of my hips, twirling before my children, as we all sing about prison sex in the thirty-foot trailer we call home.

Nothing But An Open Heart

And then there's this.

An act so large a glacier can't contain it, nor an ocean bay, not the realm of a helicopter, or the howl of a team of huskies ready to run.

And it all began with "killing time", Elias and I with 45 minutes to fill during Olive's gymnastic's class.

Having already rode most of the elevators in the town of Seward, I chose Elias's other obsessive interest and drove to the airport, a couple small wooden buildings and hangers, with a handful of four-seater planes and helicopters.

As we drove down the empty road, I saw a helicopter crossing over Resurrection Bay heading towards the airport, so we parked at Seward Helicopter Tours and watched it land. Elias leaned on his canes and bounced the way that he does when his body can't contain his heart's excitement.

"This is awesome. This is so cool," he repeated, as he shifted between his tripod lean and arching his back to stand without support, dangling his forearm crutches by his wrists, and clapping his hands in a way that whenever someone's nearby they can't help but to watch.

Elias never notices the staring eyes of others, one of the gifts of autism.

But I never miss a gawk, all those wide eyes can roll off me, or lodge in my cells, depending on my mood.

On this day, even if we'd been standing in a crowd of close-minded insecure reductionists who toss the word "retard" around without caring where it lands, I wouldn't have minded if they stared, the sun was shining, and Elias was standing next to a runway watching a helicopter land in front of him. "This is so cool!" he declared. 

When the passengers safely left the plane, the pilot turned off the helicopter and walked over to us with a warm smile.

"We're not here to fly, we're just here because he loves airports," I said.

The pilot introduced himself as Brandon and shook Elias's hand. They talked about school and the attendance/grades incentive program to earn a free helicoptor ride at the end of the year. 

A small yellow plane started its engine, the noise pulling Elias's focus from the conversation to the anticipation of possible flight. "Is it going to take off?" He clapped again. "This is awesome."

The pilot Brandon smiled.

Brandon introduced us to his wife and new baby who walked over and she said something like: "If you don't have another passenger coming, you should take them up for a ride."

This led to the Brandon writing down our names and number, in case he ever found himself with an empty seat.

What I didn't know is that as we talked outside, Kalani who does the bookings, watched us from inside, and before the day ended, Elias and I had reservations for not just a helicopter ride, but a glacier landing and dogsled tour.

When Kalani called and told me about the opening, nervous there was a misunderstanding about our desire to book a flight, I tentatively asked, "Um, and how much will this cost?"

"Nothing. Its on us," she said.

Proof. 

Proof that there really is such thing as a free ride. 

And millions of folks out there who just want to make the world a little better, a little kinder, a little more filled with grace.

So on Saturday, a glorious sunny day sandwiched between a Friday with wind gusts so strong they cancelled their helicopter tours and the force of the wind bent the poles that hold up our trailer awning, and a Sunday with rain so heavy it prompted flood warnings for the Resurrection River, Elias and I hopped in the Element for a mystery outing.

"Where should we go?" Elias asked as our car rolled down the gravel drive.

"You ready to find out?"

"Yes."

"We are going on a helicopter ride!"

Elias's face brightened, "Really?"

"Really. And not just a helicopter ride but we get to land on a glacier and do a dogsled ride too!"

"Cool!" Elias clapped and grinned and turned his head from side to side.

At Seward Helicopter Tours, everyone greeted us with smiles. We met Brandon again and the owner, Travis, who helped Elias climb into the front passenger seat and don sunglasses and headphones.

"Are we just gonna go straight up?" Elias asked, pointing towards the sky with his whole hand.

"We can."

And just like that, up, up, we went, and out across Resurrection Bay, over the mountains to the Godwin glacier, where two young mushers and a team of dogs greeted us from their summer home. 

We met each of the dogs hooked up to the two sleds, some of whom completed the Iditarod this winter, all athletes in training, stoked and ready to run. We met two ten-week old puppies who thought Elias's canes were perfect chew toys.

When it was time to ride, Elias chose the seat closer to our musher Justin and off we went, the dogs leading us around the white expanse of the glacier, following the commands of "gee" and "haw", as the mountains surrounded us in a solid embrace.

"This so awesome. This is so cool!" Elias repeated, as the smile never left my face.

On the helicopter ride back to town, Brandon asked, "Are you guys ok with low flying?"

Having never been in a helicopter before, all I could think to say was, "Sure."

And down we flew, right above the trees, following the contours of the Resurrection River as we snaked around the bends, "Here comes a big turn."

We all leaned towards the left, with a bird's eye view of our new hometown of Seward and Resurrection Bay, where the silt of the glaciers streaks the water green amidst the dark blue.

So awe-some. So cool.

A huge thank you to all the staff of Seward Helicopter Tours and Turning Heads Kennels for giving my son the gift of a day he will never stop talking about. (Remember when we rode on a helicopter?..Wasn't that cool?" ) 

And a special thanks to our pilot Brandon, for approaching Elias and I, on that gymnastics class day, with nothing but an open heart. 

We Live Here

(Up there amidst the Fir trees is the place we now call home.)

One of these days the kids and I will make colorful signs that say: We live here or Smile you're walking on our driveway.

We will hold our hand drawn signs up for hikers heading towards Tonsina Point or Caines Head when they give us strange looks as we drive past.

Some smile and wave, some glare, some shake their heads, some just stop and stare.

The foot traffic on the state park's easement, that doubles as our driveway, will slow as summer turns to fall, dwindling to the regulars that live here, who will soon realize that we do too, literally, up the hill from Tonsina Trail, where the gravel driveway splits, one path heading down towards the actual trailhead and the other climbing straight up, with the wooden private drive sign that tells hikers: Wrong way.

A lot of folks still miss the sign, and make the climb, only to be greeted by four black and white sheep dogs, herders, ready to round up the confused over-dressed camera-laden tourists and send them back down the mountain. Or maybe its a group of curious locals who just couldn't resist the itch to discover: Whats up there? 

"We basically live in a park," Nick said the other day, as we stood among the Hemlock and Spruce and watched an eagle fly overhead. With a national park stretching 1000's of miles behind us, a sate park one parcel away, and our driveway the start of a popular hiking trail that winds through the woods and down to the beach for a few miles, before reaching an abandoned World War Two fort that overlooks Resurrection Bay, my husband's words ring true.

We live in a park. We live here.

(View of our mountain from across the bay)

Last night I discovered a bag of seed pods, collected from my Anchorage gardens, mysteriously moved from the bench where I left them to the ground a few feet away, Iris, Forget-me Not, Golden Globe scattered on the shrubby grass by our fire pit.

"The birds must have moved the bag," I said to the kids, picturing the Crows or Stellar Jays picking up the small ziplock in their beaks and tossing the seeds about. "Or maybe the squirrels."

"Or a bear," Olive said.

"Or a whale," Elias grinned.

"Or the dragon," I added, referring to David's imaginary basement pet, created years ago, to keep the kids from crawling through the hole under his stairs that acts as an underground dog door.

We gathered the soaked seed pods and walked towards the outhouse, to a compost rich area recently cleared that I'm slowly turning into a perennial garden.

"We can just toss them anywhere and see what happens," I told the kids, and they both eagerly reached for the bag, fisting seeds, flinging their arms out wide. "They might make it, they might not, but we might as well try."

And isn't that all we can do.

Try.

We might make it, we might not.

But my god, I want to try.

I want to try to create the life I imagine up here on this mountainside. I want to write and grow flowers of every color. I want to learn about the native plants, the moss and fungi, the Skunk Cabbage and Devil's Club. I want to explore the mountains and shoreline with my children and Nick to know the land and the sea, not as abstract notions of escape or beauty, but intimately.

"Mom," Olive said as she split apart a brown Iris pod and scattered the small seeds about, "We could be called the nature family. Because we basically live in nature now."

Her acceptance of this change, from a neighborhood flocked with friends, to the wonders of life in the woods, from a girl who didn't want to move, to one who seems so at ease amidst the trees, makes me smile, still, from a place much deeper than her words alone. 

"I want to show you and Elias something." Olive lead us towards the edge of our clearing, to her "work area", where she stuck a dead Spruce branch in the compost of an ancient felled Hemlock tree, on the edge of our cliff that drops down to the start of the trail.

"See what I planted," she says with a proud smile, "I think its growing."

Seeds, faith, and the willingness to try, its all we really need.

And yes, we actually live here.

(Our driveway.)

Home Loss

This is the day our house in Anchorage no longer belongs to us. As much as I embrace this next adventure, a part of me will always miss the neighborhood we just left. I wrote what follows in my notebook today, my hand moving across the page without stopping to rest:

As the rooms grow empty, furniture sold, boxes packed, pictures taken down, revealing a hole in your son's door, there when you moved in and covered by a heart colored years ago by a little boy who is no longer so, a dent in the laminate floor, where the center leg held the bed you shared with the man who built the master suite with his own nimble hands,

with help from family and friends who will no longer live a beer can toss away, a custom started as a love prank between your husband and your carpenter neighbor, crushed Pabst Blue Ribbon cans tossed into each other's snow covered roofs, back when it still snowed in Anchorage, in the winter, and your children made angels, shared sleds, threw snowballs, and built forts together, miniature ice homes that melted in spring, temporary shelters, like these places you call home,

until you move, six-and-a-half years here, on Logan Street and the corner of 17th, with the giant Birch tree, strong enough for four swings, so all the neighbor kids could play, the Iris planted by the first owners over fifty years ago, strong enough to grow in the driveway, re-seeding and spreading from underground, wild roses, Ragusa and Sitka, that marked the corner house, where you hosted annual summer block parties, playing games in the street, ping pong, washer toss, basketball, corn hole,

or that time the giant slingshot emerged and adult children launched water balloons at neighbors as far as you could reach, too far now to join the rumpus, cars packed with boxes, keys delivered to the young family who will call 1626 Logan street home,

you toast with champagne and Jordan almonds, happy for each other, but under your smile lie damned salt water for the friends you leave behind, in your car sit homemade muffins, gluten-free with chocolate chip and Craisins, made as a departing gift to mirror the muffins delivered to your front door the month you arrived in Airport Heights with a boy in kindergarten and a daughter two weeks old, delivered by a neighbor with a newborn girl of her own,

your girls would grow up between houses, close as sisters, they ran between dens, starting young, as a toddler, your daughter rescued in the road, by another loving neighbor, who watched her slip out the open gate and waddle towards her friend's house, determined to find grace,

you love your neighborhood village, connected by small lots, sidewalks, and big hearts, everyone aware of each other, willing to lend an egg, a ladder, seed pods, a hand to lift that weight, oh Airport Heights, 

we leave a part of us behind as we venture anew.