Low Pressure

The ceilings have been lowered and the walls are pushing in.   Even if the winds weren’t howling, if sprays of rain weren’t pelting the side of the house, even if I were warm and dry inside a silent house with no access to the weather forecast, I would feel this storm.  It’s all pressure.  It’s a dull headache and achy joints.  It’s slowing me down.

Outside everything is accelerated:  Gusts to 55mph.   Three feet of snow from Tuesday now condensed to a waterlogged foot and a half.  The driveway, meticulously plowed a few days ago to allow us access to the world, has become a southern sloping waterway; its riverbed made of ice.  Inside we sip coffee, read books.  We think of the things we’ll bake—assuming the electricity stays.  We watch water pour off the roof, wonder when the snow will reach its saturation point.  Dinner with friends across town is cancelled.

The forecasters have used the word cyclone to describe this storm.  The satellite image is reminiscent of hurricanes and typhoons.  The startling terminology aside, this kind of weather system is not uncommon here and it poses no danger to our house.  We aren’t in a flood zone.  No trees will blow over onto our roof.  We might lose our power and we might be cut off from getting to town for a few days, but even those things are unlikely.  All we really have to do is keep a fire burning in the wood stove and wait for things to get back to normal.

Several years ago a relative asked me, “What’s so special about Alaska?”  Her accusing tone made me defensive and I talked about the mountains and the ocean and the extreme weather.  I talked about the long hours of daylight in the summer, the darkness in the winter.  I mentioned the northern lights and grizzly bears.  Everything I said was true, but she wasn’t convinced.  And to be honest, neither was I—every place has something to make it special. But her pointed question and my inadequate answers have stayed with me.

And today there is no place I have to be, no thing I have to do, which allows me to enjoy this storm and whatever it might bring.  Outside, the world is a giant swirl of wind and rain and snow and muck, and as I’m writing this I can see a bald eagle from the window beside my kitchen table.  Its wings are spread. It’s coasting on the currents of this storm—rising and falling—giving in to the push and pull of the wind.  I watch it and wonder, what’s so special about children? Or coffee, or flowers or chocolate, for that matter.  What’s the big deal about the sky or stars or fire?  Why spend an hour writing about a storm or watching an eagle play in the winds of a cyclone?

No reason.  No reason at all.

Something to Say

You’d rather write about the charming side of your town, and for the most part you do.  But this week your town has shown its not-so-charming side.  Two brothers aged eighteen and twenty were arrested for sexual assault.  A number of other young people are afraid that they might be next because they were at the party where the alleged assault took place—with cameras in hand.  A young person was victimized; his life altered.  And so you want to write about your town and what it’s going through because people are shaken up about it.  But where do you start?   Your children are the same age as these children.  They’ve known some of them since preschool.

You want to write about the mother you spoke to today whose fourteen-year-old daughter was groped at her first high school dance, a place you’d expect her to be safe.  You want to write about how strange it is, adolescence.  How that window of time between trading Pokemon cards and being hormonally charged is so small, so small that you barely have time to catch your breath.  You want to talk about this terrible thing that happened in your town like it’s an isolated incident but this is nothing new and your town is not unique.  You write about your town and you write about every town and a culture that has allowed it to go on and on and on.  You write about how it was going on when you were in middle school and the boys chased you at recess and knocked you onto the grass and stuck their hands up your shirt and you write about it now because back then you didn’t tell anyone because you had it in your mind that it was just playful playground fun—even though it didn’t feel like fun to you.

You want to write about all of this and more, but putting it in words is difficult.  The thoughts are coming from so many different places and what you need to do is set the thoughts aside for a while and write from that place in your gut that’s holding it all in.  You want to write and you don’t want to write because it’s going to take you places you’ve been avoiding.  It’s going to take you places that you’ve held in secret for about thirty years and it’s going to make you feel vulnerable because somehow you still have it in your head that it was your fault, that you put yourself in a bad situation and so ultimately you are responsible.  You hate feeling vulnerable.

You’re going to say things about boys that have most likely grown in to decent human beings, stellar community members, charitable donors to their local nonprofits.  But you decide to write it now because it’s the only way you can express what’s going on inside of you when you hear about these two young men who have been arrested for sexual assault.

You knew boys like those boys in your school days.  They were the kids the teachers liked.   They were the kids you liked.  They played basketball and football.  They were witty and popular and you wanted their attention so badly.  And so when they gave it to you it felt like a privilege.  You with the crooked teeth, that lived on the wrong side of town, that had a step-father who wouldn’t talk to you and a father who never called wanted the attention of those boys and when they gave it you certainly didn’t want to tell them no.  And so they asked you to hang out with them after school one day and you said yes and it never occurred to you that you’d be the only girl.  And you went with them anyhow because you didn’t know not to trust them.  You went to one of the boys’ houses a few blocks from school.  His dad was home and so you went instead into their camp trailer that was parked in their front yard.  You don’t remember much about the camp trailer, just being shoved down on a little folding bed, and someone undoing your pants and another someone pulling them off your legs and there was laughing and you didn’t know you were crying until you felt the tears running down the side of your face and one of them put his head to your privates and said things and did things that in your naivety you never knew were things to do and the humiliation was more than you could bear and so when it was over you laughed along with them and pretended it was no big deal and then you walked home, alone and ashamed.  At home you ate dinner and watched Three’s Company with your mom and your little sister and your silent step-dad.  You talked on the phone with your friend for a while and you never said a word about what happened because you thought somehow you should have seen it coming.  You should have known not to go with them.  You should have been smarter.  You should have been prettier because the boys probably didn’t do that to the prettiest girls.  You should have, you should have, you should have and it never even occurred to you until several years later that the should-haves weren’t yours to own.

And so you want to write about your town and what it’s going through, because what your town is going through is a terrible thing.  But it’s been going on for ages.  The humiliating, the bullying, the assaulting, the tricking, the teasing, the hurting.  All of is has been going on in varying degrees in every town.  Your town is not unique.  The actions the two boys in your town have been accused of are not so uncommon.  What’s uncommon is their being called on it.  Victims blame themselves.  They try to protect their dignity and even their assailants with silence because the assailants are the good guys; they’re popular, the teachers like them, they make your town look good on the playing field.  But silence is more terrible than truth.   It perpetuates the belief that it’s okay.  It’s okay to rape a girl if she’s wearing a short skirt.  It’s okay to mess with the drunk kid.  It’s okay to tease the kid with a learning disability.  It’s okay to shame a girl for having sex.  It’s okay to shame a boy for not having sex.  It’s okay to beat up the gay kid.  It’s okay to pull the pants off the girl who was stupid enough to follow you into the camp trailer.

It has to end somewhere.  At some point you have to say enough.  It’s not okay.  And sure, what your town is going through is a difficult thing, but it’s necessary. It’s breaking the pattern of silence.

You write about it now, not because you want attention or sympathy.  You write about it now because there is this hope that by not brushing a society’s dark secrets aside, by saying something, by doing something, you’ll make a difference. You write about it now because when you were thirteen you couldn’t articulate the truth of the matter:  it’s not okay to hurt someone, grope someone, touch someone without consent even if they’re passed out drunk, even if they’ve flirted with you, even if they’ve wandered off with you.  You write because you hope for a future where open communication reigns and where victims don’t feel responsible for the actions perpetrated against them.  You write because there should be no excuses and no free passes when it comes to harming another human being.  You write, not because you have any answers, but because you have something to say.  You believe that when it comes to teaching respect and dignity we all have something to say.

Layers Upon Layers of Normal

Floating

I would have been comfortable
floating somewhere near medium
in the realm of muted colors, suburban
yards and lite-rock.
But with you it’s AC DC,
1975 green shag
and weeds so tall
it’d take a machete to cut a trail
back to normal.

* * *

It seems appropriate—in a full-circle kind of way—that I’m going to Montana next week.  That’s where a lot of things started for me nearly twenty-three years ago.  As a twenty-year-old I moved to Missoula “to go to school,” but the real reason was to be nearer a guy that I’d met while fighting fires in New Mexico.  He lived in a small town not too far away in Idaho and the University of Montana was the closest place where I could continue my education.

The guy from Idaho was the wrong guy—that’s something I knew even before I went there—but it turns out that everything else about moving to Montana was right.  I didn’t know a soul in Missoula and so it worked out to be the place where I started to figure a few things out for myself.

It’s where I began to pay attention to nature.  It sounds silly because I grew up in Western Colorado, one of the most amazingly beautiful places I’ve ever been, but the landscape was different in Montana, so I began to see things I’d failed to notice as a kid.

It’s where I started to question religion and where I began to appreciate literature.  It’s where I first had the idea to start writing.  And it’s where I eventually met Dean.  Three years later we were on our way to Alaska and our first child, Dillon, was on the way.  He turns twenty on Sunday.

Nothing about our journey from there to here has been what I would have predicted.  As a child I imagined a much more mainstream way of living.  But we haven’t taken the normal route:  We got married young.  We had kids young.  And since then it’s been a flurry of school and summer camp and trips across the bay (when the motor doesn’t peter out) and jobs and struggling to pay the bills and homeschool and taking classes to finish the degree and gardens and neighborhood get-togethers and dogs and chickens and bears in the yard and dipnetting for salmon and old time fiddle tunes and accidents on icy roads and gun-yielding neighbors on one side and nudist neighbors on the other and all of it has been a mix of love and heartbreak and fun and frustration—and it’s been twenty years.  And now our youngest child is leaving for Montana.

Adella was born in Alaska and has been anxious to go someplace new for a few years now and so she’s going to Missoula to live with friends for her senior year of high school. And I get to go down there with her to get her registered for school and spend a week in the place where so many things began for me.  Montana seemed pretty extreme when I moved there from Colorado all those years ago.  It will be interesting to see how I perceive it after having lived in Alaska for twenty years.

(The poem at the top was in the Winter Solstice 2011 Issue of Cirque Literary Journal.)

Speaking of Chicken….

It seems that chicken is all over the news this week, and things are no different here at the Sundmark household.  Monday evening when we came home from work we discovered carnage in our yard.  The security of our chicken tractor—the one that got us through last summer with 25 healthy birds—had been breached.  Some kind of critter, most likely a dog, had broken the fiberglass greenhouse siding off of one side and proceeded to slaughter seven of our chicks.  The others went in to a state of shock and huddled together in a corner.  The ones on the bottom of the pile suffocated.  All together we lost fifteen of our chickens.

I know that eating local food isn’t going to save the world, but it’s a cause our family has decided to put some effort toward.  For us it means growing a garden or buying from local growers.  It means harvesting salmon, buying beef from our local cowboy, and raising our own chickens for both eggs and meat.  After the slaughter we found in our yard on Monday it looks like next winter we’ll have fewer chicken dinners.

There are plenty of foods I’m not willing to give up in order to eat a strictly local diet and so we spend a great deal of money on food that comes from places much warmer than Alaska.  I’m a big fan of apples, for example, and I have a weakness for the Rugged English Cheddar cheese that Save-U-More carries.  In fact Save-U-More is full of surprises, including an aisle of Trader Joe’s foods and an extensive organic produce section.  It’s a goofy grocery store with its bizarre layout and its incessant rearranging, but for the most part it keeps the foodies in Homer happy.

For the size of our town we have a good selection of restaurants and cafes as well.  Back in the day when we ran a bed and breakfast we had a guest one time that expressed surprise that a few of our nicer restaurants stayed open through the winter.  I tried to explain that in Homer people have priorities that might not be the same as in other parts of the country.  We may only buy a new pair of jeans every two or three years, and we may drive a Subaru that can only be entered through the passenger side door (true story) but we’ll spend good money on good food.  A few of our higher end restaurants have survived when Arby’s and Burger King couldn’t make a go of it.

And so it’s safe to say that after living in Homer for eighteen years I’m no expert on fast food.  I eat at the local Subway once every couple of years, and I haven’t stepped inside the local McDonalds since my niece worked there several years ago.  When I go to Anchorage there are so many great places to choose from that fast food doesn’t even cross my mind.  What all of this is getting at is that I’ve never eaten at a Chick-Fil-A, and I never will.  I wouldn’t have even if Dan Cathy had never made his statement in opposition to gay marriage, or if the company had never donated millions of dollars to organizations like the Family Research Council.

When I came home on Monday to find a bunch of dead chickens in my yard I had the realization that something I thought was secure was in fact very vulnerable.  I feel the same way today after seeing photos from around the country of crowds of people lining up to eat at Chick-Fil-A’s.  I thought we were moving beyond homophobia, but I see that we have a long way to go.  I believe that for some people eating at Chick-Fil-A this afternoon was a matter of showing support for our first amendment rights, but I don’t think that was the true motivation of most.

I’m in the fortunate position of having a diverse group of Facebook friends.  They cover most sides of any political issue and this whole Chick-Fil-A thing is no exception.  One of my friends stated in a thread that people were just taking a stand for Godly values by showing their support for Chick-Fil-A.   A couple of people on this thread even evoked the old saying, “hate the sin but love the sinner.”  It shows me that to them today’s turnout for chicken sandwiches wasn’t about first amendment rights.  It was about speaking out against homosexuality.  What I want to point out is that hating the “sin” in this case is synonymous with hating “the sinner,” because it’s not a matter of deciding to be gay; it’s a matter of being gay.  And that hatefulness, no matter how it’s framed, is disheartening.

A line from a John Gorka song comes to mind sometimes when I feel overwhelmed by the way humans build up walls and divisions between one another… We are here to love each other, that is all…

I know it’s only a line to a song and that it’s not realistic to think that this world will ever be a place where all people show love to one another all the time.  But the truth is that we all have the capacity for love on an individual level.  Every day lives are changed and attitudes are changed; every day individual worldviews are changed because one person somewhere decides to imagine the world from another person’s point of view.

We’re a diverse bunch, us humans.  Some of us will raise our chickens ourselves, some of us want ours served with a side of waffle fries.  Others of us would never think of eating a chicken.  The reality though is that we all get hungry.  Our differences are lower on the scale of importance than the things we have in common.  Let’s focus less on the ways we fill ourselves up, and more on the fact that we all need food.

A Gathering of Writers

The Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference happened this past weekend and I’m taking the day to recover and reflect.  This year I didn’t just attend the conference; I really did the conference.  I didn’t skip any sessions.  I went to the evening readings.  I even socialized after hours instead of rushing home to the solitude of my home.  I wish I had it in me to write up something cohesive to describe the weekend, but since I’m still feeling whooped and I need to save my writing energy for some revising that needs to be done over the next couple of days, I’ll stick to bullet points.

Here are few things that are sticking with me from the 2012 Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference:

  • Barry Lopez started things off with an incredible keynote address.  He asked the question, “What is the purpose of a writer in a pluralistic society?”  Then he wound around to the answer he’s come up with for himself which is that the writer’s job is to help.  So that leaves me asking, am I helping anyone or anything in any way?  Am I telling stories that need telling?
  • Ann Pancake discussed the tricky territory of writing fiction that delves into political issues.   It’s difficult, she said, but when it’s done the right way it has the potential to dispel psychic numbing.  I think of The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck, a book that I just finished reading for the first time this week.  It was relavent when it was written and its relavent today.  It’s a book that has helped.
  • Valerie Miner, one of University of Alaska Anchorage’s MFA faculty members, suggests that we are all literary citizens.  She offered ideas of how to keep the literary conversation going, one of which was simply to take one another’s writing more seriously.  And that’s one of the beautiful things about this conference; writing is shared, discussed, taught and discovered in a supportive, friendly, noncompetitive environment.  Warm fuzzies pretty much all around.
  •  Peggy Shumaker.  Alaska is beyond fortunate to have Peggy as the State Writer Laureate.  Her generosity, professionalism and kindness are a blessing.  In her closing address she admonished us to look out for one another—and nobody looks out for writers the way Peggy looks out for writers.
  • Back to Barry Lopez.  He says to know exactly why you’re writing.  It’s necessary to have a solid understanding of your purpose as a base for the rejection you will face.  Yikes, but true.  This leads me back to the forever question of why do I do this?  My answer is forming and changing all the time.  He also says that writing is not about intelligence.  It’s about telling a memorable story.  And for some reason I find that statement incredibly comforting.

Then there are the other, non-classroomy things:  I got to hear longtime acquaintances from the library read their work at the open mic and in hearing them discovered a side to them I would likely never have known had I not been there.  I ran into an old friend—one I hadn’t seen in nearly a decade—and we had the chance to get caught up with each other’s lives.   And of course I got to see lots of my MFA cronies.

The last thing I’ll mention is the bonfire.  It was just what I needed after three days of sitting.  The wind died down, the rain held off and the bay was calm.  Children of attendees ran around, drinks were shared, stories were swapped and music was played.  Amy brought her ukulele, Ed brought a guitar, TJ brought his banjo and I brought my fiddle.  Since the three of them are infinitely more musically versatile than I am we were able to play tunes into the night.  It was a great convergence of a few things that I love.

The 2012 Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference was a great gathering and next year will be too.  I mean, Naomi Shihab Nye will be the keynote speaker.  Can it get any better than that?  Hopefully I’ll see you there.

Kachemak Bay Bonfire

A Mom, First of All

ImageImage

A few months ago I had a conversation with my kids about careers.  My son is nineteen and trying to figure out what comes next for him.  My daughter is sixteen and has the next decade of her life completely mapped out.  They are about as dissimilar as two kids can be.  I constantly wonder how it’s possible for two people from the same genetic pool to turn out so incredibly different from one another.  It’s something that has baffled parents from the beginning of time, I’m sure.

The great thing about raising kids from such opposite edges of the universe is that I’ve learned so much from them—things I never would have imagined on my own if I had been given two very mediocre children.  Life would have been so predictable and boring had that been the case.

From Dillon I’ve learned that there are different paradigms from which to see the world.  Sure, I knew that already, but I’d never lived with someone who was seemingly born with that knowledge.  He questions everything and always has.  I admit that it’s made for some challenging parenting, but then I think of when I was a kid; I believed the things adults told me without much wonder as to whether they were right or not.  I did not question authority.  I did not imagine another way.   Dillon sees the world with a much broader lens than I do, and for the past nineteen years he’s shown me new ways of thinking.  His approach to life has made me a less judgmental person.  Parenting him has given me the courage to care less about convention.

Adella has shown me the power of discipline.  I know that kids are supposed to learn about determination and hard work from their parents but I can honestly say that that has not been the case in our family.  Adella was born with the inability to procrastinate and as a result she gets more done than anyone I know.  She’s not afraid of tackling any task or assignment.  When she’s struggling with a concept in math or a song for choir, she doubles up her efforts, she puts in her time, she works until she gets it.  She’s driven in a way that I have never been, and watching her set and meet goals is an inspiration.

When I try to imagine where my kids will be a decade from now I have an easier time imagining where Adella might be.  Although I don’t know what career she’ll choose, I imagine that she’ll have one firmly established by then.  When I ask her what she wants to study her answers vary.  She’s interested in psychology and social sciences.  She also wants to travel.  She’s got her path figured out though—she wants to graduate from high school early, go to a small liberal arts college on the East Coast and then possibly medical school.  She’s quick to point out that she might change her mind about the medical school part though.

Dillon lives more in the here and now, so his future is more mysterious.  When I ask him what he wants to do for a career he doesn’t have an answer, but he might pick up his guitar and play something that he’s written—some heart-felt melody that he’s come up with on his own.  He shows me the value of being present in the moment.  He reminds me that for some, the journey is more interesting if the route involves meandering the back roads for a while instead of taking the interstate.

They’re at that age now, where we have a lot of discussions about the future.  In one of our conversations a while back, when I was questioning them about their desires and goals, they turned it back on me.  “What did you always want to be, Mom?  Have you always wanted to be a writer?”  I thought about it for a while.  I thought back to when I was their age.  I didn’t have any career goals.  If anyone were to have asked me what I wanted to be back then I would have told them I wanted to become a teacher, but that wasn’t necessarily true.  The true answer wasn’t something anyone wanted to hear, especially from a teenager.

“I wanted to be a mom,” I told them.  “It’s the one thing—the only thing—I really knew about myself.”

I think they were surprised to hear me say that.   For the last several years I’ve been so busy working and going to school and trying to establish myself as a writer that I may not have given them the impression that they were my first choice, that I wanted them first and foremost.  Sure, I want to be a wildly successful writer now, but it will always be lower on the rung of things I’ve wanted in my life.  I wanted them most of all and I’ve been lucky and blessed enough to have my heart’s desire.  Everything else I might have or achieve just adds to the abundance of what I’ve already been given.

Unchanging Things

I recently read The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien.  It’s a book that’s been around for a while and although I kept meaning to read it, it somehow kept getting pushed to the bottom of my list.   Now I can say with confidence that it’s among my favorites and I wish everyone would read it.

Tim O’Brien was drafted into the Vietnam War and he wrote The Things They Carried based on his experiences before, during and after his tour of duty.  He plays with fiction in such a way that as I was reading it I kept finding myself confused as to whether I was reading fiction or nonfiction or some weird hybrid of both, which I think was O’Brien’s whole point.  It was the perfect example of fiction being used to tell the truth, and a reminder that truth is powerful, regardless of how it’s expressed.  This is good stuff for a struggling writer to remember.

Today I’m working on my own piece of fiction, but I’m distracted.  I keep thinking about my nephew Dan, who’s spent the last year of his life in Afghanistan.  This, his third (or is it his fourth?) tour of duty, is coming to a close and soon he’ll be back in Colorado.  I keep checking Facebook to see if he’s updated his status to say that he’s on his way, but so far he’s just said, “1 step closer.”  It’s the anticipation of his leaving the country that’s making it hard for me to focus on anything else.

I don’t know the things that Dan will be bringing home with him from the war—the images and people and experiences he’ll carry with him for the rest of his life, but I do know that a person can’t be sent to war and come out of it unchanged.

Some things about Dan are unchanging though.  For as long as I’ve known him (which is his whole life,) he’s had an unfaltering faith in God.   He’s been wise beyond his years.  Kindness is something he’s never had to work at—it comes naturally to him, and his experiences, both good and bad, have given him the ability to truly empathize with others.  He’s also got a great sense of adventure.  These unchanging things that he’s had with him since he was a boy will help him carry anything that might feel too heavy.

So as I’m here at home, on the comfort of my couch, struggling to write fiction, I’m thinking about Dan, who’s had a long, rough year in a hostile land.  He’s seen things that I’ll never see.  He’s lost friends in ways that I never will.  I hope he knows that I’m thankful that he went, thankful that he served, but mostly I’m thankful that he’ll be home soon.  Today, nothing feels more important than that.

Gradual Thaw

As many of you know, it’s been a big snow year in south central Alaska.  A few big storms left us buried early on, and due to the cold temperatures it never melted.  It just kept adding layers until finally, sometime around the spring equinox, we crossed over into the thawing stage.

It hasn’t been as messy a breakup as some years; we haven’t had much rain or a thin layer of volcanic ash on top of the snow like we had a few years ago when Mount Redoubt blew.  That year when the sun came out the snow melted so fast that the streets flooded.   Even the mountains across the bay lost their white cover in what seemed like a matter of days.

But this year the thaw is gradual.  Every few days we’ll discover something new in our yard that has been buried all winter—a missing shovel or the dogs’ Frisbee.  And the melting is uneven.  The snow drifts were highest on the west side of the house, which means that the crocuses are still under nearly three feet of snow.  In the front yard, where the sun blazes against the blue siding of the house, some nice heat is generated. There a few blades of grass are turning green and the chives are poking through, long enough already to add to the scrambled eggs.

*  *  *

      I think about my dad this time of year.  It was five years ago in April when we realized he was dying.   By the time they’d diagnosed him with Multiple Myeloma it was too late.  That year, in the time it took to go from winter to spring, I had to adjust to the idea of my father being gone forever.

One of the hardest things, one of the things I never admitted to him, was that I don’t believe in heaven.  When I said goodbye to him, it was really goodbye.  I didn’t have any notion of all of us someday feasting together at a common table situated somewhere on streets paved of gold in the sky.  It’s a lovely idea, a hopeful idea, but I can’t make myself believe it—even though I’ve tried.

Since my dad’s been gone I’ve been able to be more honest about my beliefs, or, as the case may be, my non-beliefs.  While he was still around I didn’t want to risk the possibility of  him thinking less of me.  And once he was gone it didn’t take long for me to find the courage to voice my opinions.  The year after he died I published my first piece of writing ever, and it had to do with the offense I felt at all of the hell-fire talk my family had to endure at the ceremony outside of Telluride when we scattered his ashes.  It was a traumatic event for me, but it was the beginning of my own gradual thaw.  Things I’d kept hidden away began to surface.  They’re still surfacing.

I’ll never know exactly how things would be if my dad were still here.  Would I have figured out a way to be honest with him about my beliefs?  Would I be as outspoken about my tendency toward agnosticism?  Sometimes it’s easier to hide the truth than it is to hurt the people we love.  I like to think that if we’d had more time we could have navigated our way through our differences.  My dad may not have understood me, or my way of thinking, but he loved me and I loved him.  And love has a way of superseding belief, if we let it.

Vexation of Spirit

Human beings are complicated creatures.  Each of us can define ourselves a hundred different ways—in relation to our families, our jobs, our interests, our gender, our appearance.   Some of the traits that define us stick for a lifetime, but part of what makes us complicated is that we’re ever-changing.

Last year in May I was feeling content.  I even wrote about how I was happy to be here, in my home, with my family, my job and my dogs.  I’m pretty sure that some Prozac popping person wrote that blog post with its proclamation of unabashed contentedness.  It certainly doesn’t fit how I’m feeling nowadays.

I don’t like to complain about the weather.  I know it accomplishes nothing.  But this winter is getting me down.  It’s made me use up my reserves of optimism and hopefulness.  It’s gotten me to that place of not wanting to get out of bed in the mornings.  In short, it’s kicking my butt.

This winter has been an intense one, but I think it’s the cumulative effect of twenty Alaskan winters that’s getting to me.  Sure it helps that the days are getting longer—we’re gaining nearly six minutes of daylight every day now—but the truth is we still have at least five feet of packed snow in the yard.  The temperatures are staying put in the teens and twenties.  We still have to get through a lot of slush and muck before we get down to the ground.  The part that’s depressing me the most though, the part that’s sucking away the joy of the returning light and making me wonder how much more Alaska is in my future, is that I’m holding out for a summer that Coastal Alaska cannot deliver.

The Rocky Mountain summers set the standard for me at an early age.  Those Colorado clear sky days imprinted themselves into my psyche and forevermore my mood will be determined by the ratio of clouds to blue.  I’m not proud of this.  I’ve tried talking myself into having a more positive attitude.  I’ve considered the benefits of living in a land not wanting for water, but it comes down to the things about summer that I miss—the heat of the sun on my skin, wearing short sleeved shirts without having goose bumps, wading into rivers in a pair of shorts and sandals.

I tried to express to a friend the other day how I’m feeling. “Malaise” she said, offering me as close as I’d come to a perfect word to describe my current state of being.  I looked it up:  Malaise is a highly non-specific symptom and causes can range from the slightest ailment such as an emotion or hunger, to the most serious. Generally speaking, malaise expresses a patient’s feeling that “something is not right”, like a general warning light, but only a medical examination can determine the cause.

I don’t think I need a medical professional to determine the cause of what ails me and I certainly don’t need to pay money for someone to tell me to take Vitamin D, get exercise every day, or find meaningful activities to fill my time.  I’ve got those things covered.  But still the malaise continues.

Typically when my emotions are out of whack I turn to writing, but even that has been a struggle for the past couple of months.  Perhaps my imagination is snow blind.  I’m coming up with tremendously boring characters.  Their lives are less exciting than my own.  I’ve tried to make up for my writing deficits by turning to literature.  But lately whenever I sit down to read I fall asleep.  The only thing that keeps me going is a chocolate chip reward system that I’ve developed.  It’s okay for short stories but it isn’t great for novels.

Right now I’m working my way through the book Fiction Writer’s Workshop by Josip Novakovich.  (I’m taking lots of notes so I don’t need chocolate chips for this one.) In one of the sections he discusses word choice.  He suggests that we should never settle for a word that is not exactly right.  The idea has me turning to my Roget’s Thesaurus of Words and Phrases frequently.  I looked up malaise because although it comes close to describing my mental state lately, it’s not quite the perfect word.  Malaise led me to Pain.  Pain led to mental suffering, displeasure, dissatisfaction, inquietude, and then this phrase:  vexation of spirit.

I think that’s it.  This winter has my spirit vexed.  The core of my being is irritated, annoyed, troubled, tormented, distressed.  Our firewood supply is dwindling and we’re supposed to get more snow today.  Besides that I’m cold most of the time.  Maybe the ever-changing part of me is realigning my internal compass, pointing me back toward the place where I started, to the part of the country where the sun shines most days.  Or maybe it’s just the intensity of this winter that has me so disjointed.  Either way, I’ll try not to complain too much.  I’ll try not to define myself by my current state of mind.  Vexation of the spirit runs rampant in Alaska this time of year and I know it will pass.  Sometimes though, I just need to vent.

Back in Time

To say that I’m baffled would be an understatement.  I’m used to abortion being a hot issue in every presidential campaign—it has been since I’ve been old enough to vote, but this whole discussion about legislating birth control is throwing me off.  It’s making my head spin.  Really, there are serious contenders in the presidential race that think that birth control is morally reprehensible?  How is this not a joke?  How is this happening?  Or more importantly, where is this coming from?

Earlier this week an Indiana state representative refused to sign a resolution honoring the 100-year anniversary of the Girl Scouts because he says they are a “tactical arm of Planned Parenthood.”  Sure, nobody puts too much weight on the opinions of one state representative from Indiana, but his willingness to so blatantly slam the Girl Scouts, an organization known for providing girls with self-esteem building opportunities, indicates a problem.  The problem is that many people are still threatened by the idea of smart, independent women who are in control of their own reproductive health and in the GOP’s effort to out-conservative each other, they’ve started saying offensive things—out loud—things that would have been unacceptable in a different climate.

So who are “they” and why are they feeling so threatened?  Well, they’re the minority for one thing.  Most Americans believe that affordable birth control is just fine.  So why is this issue even coming up?  Why is President Obama’s plan for across the board access to birth control being made out to be evil?  It defies logic.  Present day economics dictate that for most families both parents have to work.  Would having more children help lessen the financial burden for families?  No, it would not.  Would keeping women out of the work force help families be less dependent on the government for their basic needs?  No, it would not.  Without birth control would there be fewer abortions?  I don’t think so.  Is President Obama going to make everyone use birth control?  No, he is not.

Why is birth control even an issue then?  All I can come up with is that the GOP presidential candidates are so clueless as to how to tackle the issues our country faces today that they’re focusing instead on an issue that will take the spotlight off of the fact that they have no ingenuity.  They don’t know how to address our economic woes or how to begin a discussion on how we’re going to power a country that can’t continue to rely solely on coal and oil for its every need.  Instead they’re going back in time.  They want to return to 1950, to a time when America seemed on top of its game, women knew their place, most homosexuals were in the closet and there weren’t so many pesky laws in place to keep environmental degradation in check.  Those were the good old days—unless of course you were a person of color, a member of the LGBT community or a woman who wanted to limit the size of her own family.

As a woman born in 1968 it’s been relatively easy for me.  But some of the things I’ve been hearing lately from the Republicans running for office have served to remind me that my freedoms haven’t been in place for such a long time.  My own grandmother was twenty-one years old when women were granted the right to vote.  Until 1936 birth control information was considered obscene and was prohibited from being distributed through the mail. The equal pay act was passed only five years before I was born.  When I look at the timeline of women’s rights I see that I’ve been lucky.  I was able to have a say in the size of my family.  I haven’t been paid less than my male co-workers simply because I’m female.  I’ve been allowed to vote!

So I guess I take it personally when a group of white, wealthy men start dissing the Girl Scouts or suggesting that women shouldn’t necessarily have access to affordable birth control.  I look at the girls from my daughter’s Girl Scout troop and I’m proud of the young women they are becoming.  They’ve canoed through the Alaskan wilderness.  They’ve volunteered in our community to make it a better place.  They’ve been positive role models to younger troops.  They’ve learned to be true friends to each other.  In a couple years these girls will be launching out of our small town and into the bigger world.  They’ll be well prepared.  I know they’ll do a good job of reminding the world that smart, independent, empowered women need not be feared, in fact they make the world a better place.