the sun strikes the north like a flint strikes steel
and leaves purple fingerprints on the sky
The north swings away like a bell at the peal
and spends a proud season ringing wide
burning obsession and magnetic attraction
trapped like the strand and the tide
the sun loves the north in some furious fashion
that’s sweetest in lingering goodbyes
It has been snowing for twenty-four hours now, though the accumulation is only a few inches. In any case, Nicole officially has the better part of spring with her crocuses and butterflies. I went walking yesterday afternoon in the biting wind and snow, and the village was all but deserted. B and A slid up on a fourwheeler to offer me a ride. A’s loooong ponytail swung across her back as they slipped to a stop, and the wind picked it up and blew it into her face. B squinted and grinned at me, tipping his head to keep the sideways snow from blowing into his eyes.
In these past few weeks, people have grown much friendlier. A few days ago, a student’s grandma stopped me on a walk to invite me on a trip to Big Lake during carnival, and to warn me not to go too far alone because of the wolves. This morning, A and her brother, B, invited me in for waffles and to watch part of Mr. Bean. Someone always says hello to me, now, and people will stop me to talk about their kids or the school or carnival. I’m glad that folks have, indeed, warmed up with the weather.
This was taken from the bank of the river on our warmest day yet, looking down onto the frozen water. I like how it looks almost like a wave breaking on a beach somewhere. I had to try several times to get close to the way I wanted it, but I like how it came out. I’m learning.
I brought in a willow branch on Monday afternoon, and by bedtime its buds had popped out in all their soft, fuzzy glory. Spring is swift and opportunistic in Alaska, I guess. You could almost watch these buds burst like popcorn.
There are these wonderful, fat birds that I’ve started seeing around. I don’t know about birds, but they look like overstuffed super-sized birdfeeder birds. Obviously, this picture is of no use to anybody as far as identification goes, but I like the image very much.
The fat ones make a nice change from the ubiquitous ravens, which were flying together in the snowfall this morning, making a peculiar bubbling noise. I like ravens well enough. They have these great big fluffy ruffs around their necks, like little black flying lions that eat garbage.
My class is making pysanky eggs next week. It’ll be a little lame after Easter, but I think the kids will still dig it. They loved blowing eggs this week, and Shannon was awesome and let them bring their jars of egg down to the kitchen where she fired up the griddle and scrambled each kid’s individual portion for a snack. I have dozens of perfect, empty, white eggshells drying on the windowsill now, just waiting for the post to catch up with our activities.
My amazing parents sent Easter baskets for each of my students, filled to bursting. We’re going to have a lot of fun with the marbles next week when carnival and testing leave us with weird time to fill. The kids ate themselves sick before lunch, occasionally asking “Ms O! Is this a marble or is it candy?” Nobody died.
Things have been weird at school. We have state testing confusion and personal issues among the staff out the wazoo. With carnival next week and Easter this weekend, we had a real pressure cooker going. It would have been fine, but the interpersonal problems with the staff have been getting to me. There’s subterfuge and manipulation and venom everywhere, and I don’t feel like I can really trust anyone.
My nerves finally got completely fried yesterday. After a few kids made heavy power plays, I broke. I tried to get it together during lunch, but, when the kids got back, I still had tears plopping off my face. I tried for a few minutes to cool it, and, to their credit, the kids did exactly what I asked of them. When I realized it was hopeless, I went to ask Jake to find someone to cover for me. Instead, he dismissed the class early and sent me home to cry it out, which I did. My students were brilliant. They brought me cupcakes and feel better cards, and told me to call Sean so that I wouldn’t have to feel so bad. They were everything I needed to feed the kindness and patience and trust that had worn thin and snapped. It’s not the job and it’s certainly not the kids that wear on me: it’s the climate of suspicion among my coworkers that grinds me down.
There will be changes next year, and for that I’m grateful. I have my fingers crossed for someone who will climb mountains with me on the weekends and likes to play board games. If you are reading this, I make good pizza and great cookies, and I’m willing to learn to cross-country ski properly. 
Carnival starts on Monday, and I’m starting to get excited. On my morning walk, a gentleman I know passed me on his four wheeler with two dogs hitched to a plastic sled running behind. In the sled was his four-or-five-year-old granddaughter, laughing her head off. My kids keep telling me how excited they are for the dog races and the princess coronation. C will be racing four dogs and also running for princess. She started making her own earrings during math class this week, when I deemed her sufficiently ahead in her work.
I can’t wait to see her in her outfit with all that dark hair falling down her back. She’s usually very practically dressed with her long braid tucked into the back of her sweatshirt. It’ll be a privilege to see her in the dress and slippers that she’s been working so hard on with her auntie and grandma, and to hear her give her speech in Gwich’in. I’m going to ask her to make a pair of earrings for me. If she can be persuaded to make them, I’ll treasure them forever.
We hiked out to Big Lake last night and did not get eaten by an ice bear. Now that I have once ventured into the bush, fully out of earshot of snow-gos and yelping dogs, I do not think wild horses could keep me out. I prowled alone all over the outskirts of the village tonight, following tracks through the trees, hoping to spot a lynx. I felt wildly daring when I stepped off the snow-go-beaten trail and stalked through the deep, dry powder, following an intriguing set of prints down a trail no person had been on since last snowfall. I didn’t find the animal that left the tracks (they were old, but I liked their winding line and followed anyway). The only wild thing I met on my walk was a chickadee, singing his spring song from a spruce tree. I stopped at his tree to watch him cock his jaunty, capped head as he hopped, and to rub powdery pitch between my fingers until it became soft and sharp-smelling.
On our hike last night, Sean and I saw no sign of the rumored bear, but we saw a squirrel scamper across the trail and stop in the snow, flicking his tail. He looked at us for a long time, and let us get surprisingly close. The squirrels here are small and ferociously alert, nothing like the languid, fat squirrels of suburbia. I expected him to break for the woods at any second as we drew near, but he didn’t. Instead, he vanished. Poof! We walked to the spot where he’d staged this trick and, sure enough, found the trap-door. The squirrel had whack-a-moled into a tunnel in the snow. Sean and I peered in, incredulous, and the squirrel popped up at the base of a shrub some ten feet away. I shrieked with surprise as it broke for the treeline.
It felt good to have someone to walk with me. It has felt good all week to have someone with me, and now I think the engine of this morning’s plane must have deafened me, because the quiet is so complete and sudden. I miss Sean and his bounce and bright warmth, but I’m not letting go of the fact that I chose this independence for a thousand right reasons. Sadness is silly when there are tracks to trace through the snow and sunsets to race to the riverbank. There’s a mountain I want to climb this spring, and looking at it makes my heart leap up, quick and giddy as a hand catching a blown kiss.
I walked to the airport to meet my favorite fella, who tumbled out of the copilot’s seat with cilantro bouquet in hand.
Drip, drop, drip.
Drop.
It was warm today. Chunks of snow hurled themselves over the eaves and hurtled past my classroom windows at startling intervals all day long. Icicles drizzled melt water into the pitted snow below.
Yesterday, Shannon and Terri shanghaied me after school and took me to Big Lake on Shannon’s new snow-go. I was sandwiched between them, my cold face buried in the fur ruff on Shannon’s jacket. The narrow, icy trail slipped and skittered under the roaring snowmachine, and I felt my knees grip harder, skittish and too-cautious as always.
When we got there, I looked up and around at the expanse of white and blue and space in every direction. I could feel the mountains yarding on my heartstrings across the ice. I have to get up there, once at least, before I leave the village for good. I should have taken pictures of the mountains: If I had, you could probably see the words “come hither” stenciled in the sky by their ridges. I did, I think, or maybe it was just a whisper from inside the part of me that loves to want just for wanting’s sake, and lingers, grinning, on windy precipices, tasting salt.
I took only one ridiculous snow-go selfie with Terri, but in my defense, Shannon was in front of me, I was in awe, I had no gloves (abducted, remember?) and those machines can fly.
I opened the window over my sink wide today and let the sound of the ice and snow, first slipping and scraping on the metal roof, then falling in white sheets to smash on the ground in a snow-cone splash, slip into my kitchen over the log-deep sill.
It’s been an exhausting week. The shattering ice confused with the chattering of the girls and made a little white noise for me rummage in to find a smile. They mixed their own cookies while I made a pot of curry and arbitrated disputes over who would get to choose a cookie first. They laughed and left their wet snowpants in puddles on the floor and hung their grubby socks to dry on the ledge of my open window and tracked muddy prints all over the floor and made me happy.
Yesterday evening, C came by to tell me that her sister wouldn’t be able to make it to school today. P would have to stay home and babysit the four-year-old so that their auntie could make it to work. We walked over to the school in the dusk light and got P’s math book and independent reading so that she wouldn’t fall behind. “I will never have kids” said C. “It isn’t fair”
The village is grieving and drinking and grieving. A young man passed away last weekend, and everyone is reeling. I knew the man, who used to cook for the school. He played country music too loud and grinned and danced along when I’d bop by in the middle of my crowd of kids, mouthing the words and playing mini air guitar. One of my boxes wound up at his house, and I met his newborn baby and his wife on one of my first days in the village.
The kids have been sullen and sleepless. No one is taking this well, and those whose families live hard have retreated into silence to bear the living harder.
Today, the body was returned to the village. Nearly everyone met the plane at the airport. My class chose to go, and we rode packed in the back of the red school pickup, bending our heads against the wind. We hopped out of the truck and joined the crowd of people standing in the melt-glittery white light of morning. Everyone looked up as the fat plane ripped the blue sky open overhead. When the long wooden box was lowered out of the plane, the young men lifted it and began to walk the mile or so back to the village. The rest of us followed on foot, the fourwheelers and snow-gos growling behind. As one man tired, another stepped in to take his place bearing the dead. A skin drum beat time all the way to the village, and a man’s husky singing voice rose above the footfalls and engines and quiet talk of the crowd. Halfway home, an obviously intoxicated man stumbled into M, a severely autistic high schooler. M looked at me with silent, confused, helpless big brown eyes and tried to step away. Another boy dodged behind me until the man fell behind us.
The men of the village carried Earl right up the steps of the church and through the front door. Everyone stood inside in winter coats. After a few short prayers, a murmured amen, everyone left. I took my students back to class.
Yesterday, one girl wrote in her writing journal that the brilliant, multicolored northern lights of this past week have comforted her. She feels like they’re a message from her uncle on his way to wherever he’s going, a silent promise that it will be okay.
For steel-eyed sixth grader, C, it’s not enough. She’s angry and righteous and pained. She blames alcohol. Drinking has been ripping up the village like a wrecking ball these past few weeks. She wants the council to get together and stop it. “They used to check planes and raid people’s houses that did it, but they don’t do nothing now.” I want so badly for her to have the voice to scream it all someday and be heard, but for now she can’t, and it’s ripping her apart. She is so small and her feelings are so big. This place puts awful burdens on children.
Tonight, Terri, the lower elementary teacher who lives next door, banged on my window. “Come look!” she shrieked, “it’s incredible!”. I gathered my robe around my legs and stepped barefoot onto the porch. It was warm today, and the night was bearable for a long moment.
I stood slackjawed until the cold bit too hard into my toes and my bare knees had goosebumps.
Moments later, I was flinging pants and a coat and a hat on.
Have you ever laid back in a spinning playground tire swing and watched the northern lights ripple and unspool from green to pink in the sky? They unwind across the velvet stars like skeins of acid yarn. They flutter and shimmer like handlebar ribbons in the summer. Night lights for people in the cold.
chasing piggens 