Thanks as always to The Other McCain, Pirate’s Cove, and Bacon Time for the Rule Five links!
No news stories today, just a little bit of omphaloskepsis. Last Friday evening, our oldest daughter and her husband wrapped up a week-long visit to the Great Land when they boarded a red-eye flight back to their home in the upper Midwest. It’s gotten awfully quiet around here already.
Just about the only drawback of living up here in the Great Land is that all of our kids and grandkids are down in the 48. Not that it isn’t worth it, mind, as long as we’re able to fly down there or they, up here, on occasion. But it’s mid-September now. The tourist season is wrapping up as big-game seasons end, and our guest room will be empty now until spring. In a month or snow it will start to snow, and about then I’ll start the wood stove up and we’ll start making our way through the roughly two and a half cord of firewood I have stacked up.
Winter has its compensation. Our favorite eating spots are less crowded on Saturdays. The whole area goes kind of quiet, but the locals – a group we can now count ourselves among, after all those years of planning and saving – take a bit of enjoyment in having Alaska to ourselves, at least until the Iditarod shows up and kicks off another year of visitors. And winter is kind of fun, as Mrs. Animal and I do our daily routines here in our rural Alaska home, just the two of us. Sometimes we go a week or ten days in winter without seeing another person, and that suits us just fine; we really do have a remarkably happy and stable marriage.
Life is like the drive-through lane. You just need to keep moving forward. Right now, it’s forward into another winter. And that’s just fine.
