Dinner

About a week and a half ago, certain business matters required that I be at the office between 1:30 a.m. and 3:30 a.m. Stuff happens on the east coast that doesn't recognize the imposition on folks four time zones away. Anyway, I could either be awake at the house and, if necessary, get dressed and race to the office to fax necessary information or answer questions on the phone...or I could simply stay overnight at the office. This is not difficult. There is a kitchen, food, comfy couch for spreading a sleeping bag on, and I had my alarm clock to wake me for the time I needed to be alert.

I prepared a cup of tea, cranked up my computer, read a book after I read e-mails, and--at sleepy time, donned my pjs, fluffed out the sleeping bag, punched up the pillow, and snestled down on the couch ready for sleep. Ahh. After a certain amount of scrunching and turning, I found the right combination of soft spot and support, and, yawning, I settled in for the first half of the night's sleep.

It's often difficult to sleep in a strange place, especially when it's a large room. Unfamiliar creaks signal that the heat has kicked in, a couple of clunking sighs indicate the refrigerator motor has cut off. Outside the wind clicks branches together, lights across the river resolve into reflections on the window of the microwave clock. It's not the small cozy bedroom you're used to...but, hey, it's indoors, it's warm, it's fine.

It was fine until, just beneath my ear, I heard a tiny rustling noise. Nah, outside. Another turn. Dang, another rustly scrabbling. I bolted to a sitting position, heard no further noise, called myself silly names, and turned around so my head was at the other end of the couch. I scooched and shifted, settled down on my pillow, closed my eyes, and damned if it didn't happen again. I realized that I shared the couch with a small guest. Now I'm not fearful of little quadrupeds, but I sure don't like trying to sleep with one channeling from one end of the couch innards to the other!

"OK, little dude, you can have the couch," I conceded, and moved the hassock over to the armchair, set up there, and managed to achieve a slouching doze for about an hour. I heard no further rustlings, saw no evidence of wee sleekit beasties, and when 3:30 came, I packed all my gear in the car and drove back to the house for the remainder of the night.

Two mornings later, in the kitchen just before the start of work, as we were making coffee and tea, chatting about the day to come, the older of the two staff dogs suddenly stomped over to the corner next to the sink. If ever a sled dog was en pointe, it was Tusker. And there scuttling along the base of the cabinet was my couch companion: a little vole. It raced across the room, heading, no doubt, for the safety of the couch.

Jan noted that it was probably time to haul out the traps. After some discussion of names for the interloper, we agreed that it was a bad idea to name something we planned to kill. Then MJ, laughing, suggested we call it Dinner. And it stuck. We laughed our way upstairs to our desks, one ear open for the trap snap announcing Dinner's dispatching.

The first day the trap remained poised and waiting, the cheese radiating fragrance. The next morning, the cheese was gone! No Dinner in the trap. This time Jan wedged a peanut into the trap ensuring our quarry would have to do some substantial prying, resulting in...well, you can figure it out.

It's been a week, now. Several times a day we check the trap line, and each time the tempting morsel is gone, the trap unsprung. We've tried raisins, bits of cheese with peanut butter in addition to the plain cheese and peanuts. Each time the quick, crafty little critter makes off with the bait. Maybe the laugh is on us for having thought we could outwit the vole who managed come in from the Alaskan winter.

Regardless, Dinner has dined quite well this week.

Groceries, Goldeneyes, and Graupel

It's clear that the picture is neither groceries, nor a goldeneye, so it's fair to say it must be graupel. And what--you ask--is graupel? Google it! I did.

It's another of those phenomena that seem commonplace here at this time of year, but I've managed to live close to 69 years without knowing there was such a thing. So the other evening, during an especially heavy graupelshower, I went outside and aimed the camera at the ground. Voila.

There is much about this place that I continue to find new. I've lived in Alaska before, but Anchorage provides an urban setting with Starbucks, high-rise buildings, and suburban sprawl. Living there is pretty much like living in any city, just with a longer and darker winter and moose out the kitchen window. Last summer I enjoyed complete off the grid living--heat the cabin with a woodstove, walk down the hill to the showers, walk up the hill to the outhouse. But with upscale food that I didn't have to prepare and a view off my porch of the tallest peak on the North American continent.

But living here at the east end of Denali National Park, at mile 227.5 of the George Parks Highway is different. The community is invisible from the road although the road can be heard from the invisible homes. The community center serves myriad purposes: large meeting room for group gatherings and the knitting group, training room upstairs for the volunteer fire persons, garage for the vehicle beneath the room. It's where you can get drinking water--bring your own 5-gallon plastic jugs--and it's where the CSA distributes produce. Day care and dance, they both meet here.

While last summer I experienced isolated group living, this is more isolated solitary living. And I have to prepare my own food. I came up from Anchorage a month ago with a plastic bin full of groceries: some went in the freezer, some in the refrigerator, but most is of the sort that needs neither. My shopping list was lengthy, and the cart filled up fast with pasta and sauce, applesauce for when the fresh apples ran out, flour and yeast for bread, tea, coffee, peanut butter and rice cakes, milk and sandwich cheese, squash for soup, quarts of chicken stock, and more containers of yogurt than I've ever purchased at once. With the nearest [limited and expensive] shopping in Healey (20 miles north at $4.999 per gallon to get there), you don't do a lot of zipping out to get what you forgot! You make what you've got work--from the planning of the list to the figuring out what to use first. Cabbage may not be what I want, but that's what's wilting, so I've got to use it.

The weekends are full of housework as I tend this beautiful home I've been allowed to occupy. Saturdays I do chores: sweep, vacuum, scrub down, neaten up. On Sundays, laundry sloshes and fluffs, soups steam, bread rises, as I cook and bake for the week. I've been to Fairbanks once (2.5 hours to get there), and this weekend I head to Anchorage for the last weekend before the summer. I'll drive one of the company vehicles down so it's in town for arriving staff; I'll come back on the bus that another staff member drove down today for staff and supply pickup.

And I'll come back to this lovely location on one of several small ponds (they're lakes here). I've watched the ice go out and the birds come back. Last weekend I heard a strange noise, looked out the window, and there were two pairs of Trumpeter Swans flapping and swimming about, dipping their long necks beneath the water to feed. But there were just a whole slew of ducks! I'd visited the bookstore at Denali National Park on opening day to get a bird book (I'd forgotten to bring mine from Milwaukee), so I dug it out of the bag and started trying to identify all the ducks. I recognized the Mallards...kind of the 'Smith' of ducks, and after much page turning and binocular peering I realized I was seeing Barrow's Goldeneyes! [much more page-flipping and peering] And Wigeons! I knew the word, but I'd never seen one. Unlike goldeneyes, Wigeons float along on top of the water like Little Toot. It's a hoot to watch them all up-ended and waggle-tailed as they forage beneath the surface.

I'm learning so much here. Old skills come back to me, but what's most fascinating is the amount of completely new things I'm bumping up against. I can feel the gratitude building, like it did last summer, as I meet wonderfully generous and gracious people, appreciate new artwork, savor the fresh air blowing from the south and the snow flurries blowing from the north, discover birds I'd only known in books, and as I learn a new job, answer new questions.

And I smile--no, grin--that I'm only a couple of months away from my 69th birthday, and I'm still eagerly seeing and doing things for the first time. Dieu soit beni.