Rhubarb in the Snow

First Flight

The ice on the pond at the airport melted away and we were able to launch the new float plane yesterday.




We flew around Douglas Island after Dave did his touch and goes (three take-offs, three landings). Below is a view of downtown Juneau from the air.

Things That Swirl Around Me

My friend had an emergency hysterectomy. Another friend was found delirious on the floor, almost dead from a septic hip. Emergency surgery saved her as well.

A.'s daughter died, at 27, of a drug overdose. Her 10 year old grandson is now an orphan and the two youngest kids have a father who is usually in jail, on the psych unit or stoned. A. has a house full of children and can't work. Plus her daughter died. Her daughter died.

So-and-so, who I love, lost his job.

I have been unable to forgive a couple of people in my life for wrongs done to those I love. This failure of mine eats away at me.

Yet my last post was about the weather.

I want to write honestly but I know this blog will remain a document about the surface of things. I read blogs where all is revealed, where hearts are emptied out in an apparently therapeutic fashion. I could never do that. Many things I will never say on the web, on camera or even write down in a paper journal. I have written a few honest letters and I can talk to my good friends, to my siblings and to my capacious husband but to make certain feelings permanent by recording them is too risky for me. I fear being discovered.

I can write here like I write in the boat log and the flight book and the journal at the cabin. This blog can serve as a travel journal and a baby book, a scrap book for knitting projects and a photo album.

33 killed at Virginia Tech. 178 dead in four bombings in Baghdad. I feel it like a blow but it won't make it into the blog. The blog is for the good things that I can say anywhere. Like....

Happy Anniversary, Dave. I love being married to you.

Goodbye to Winter

I swear to myself that I won't write about the weather, but we Juneau folks are obsessed. It gets worse as we turn into old people.

We can now put the winter boots away and store the snow shovels. Our thoughts turn to budding plants and bicycles and long, summer days. Some people just think about their airplanes and motorcycles. The Alaska Folk Festival is happening downtown this week which is always a sign of the new season. We are ready for Spring.

A Week at the Cabin

The bridge broke. Dave went out with a bunch of men, some who worked and some who watched, and made the bridge right again. A key to the success of this operation was a very large piece of heavy machinery which did the major lifting. Yay, hydraulics!

It is easy to stare at the mountains across the lake from the cabin. With high powered binoculars, you can see goat tracks and, occasionally, actual goats, wandering around in the deep snow. The avalanche chutes draw the eye like the face of a glacier; all that snow is hanging there waiting to fall and you want to see it when it happens. One of the slopes in the photo above was deemed safe enough for heliskiers to use so we watched six people carve their way halfway down the bowl with the shadow falling across it. The scale is deceiving; we couldn't even see the helicopter without major magnification.