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d moved from nome near the arctic circle a desolate place devoid of trees or mountains this new landscape was lush foreign and filled with the promise of new beginnings and maybe all of us were dazzled by the sight of fool s gold bright mica that was so abundant in the icy clear waters of the little susitna the river that tumbled from the mountains down into the valley below my mother and my then new stepfather a handsome second generation irishman from new jersey bought the lodge in order to fulfill his dream of running a real irish pub it was purchased with the entirety of my mother s retirement savings as well as a hefty chunk of borrowed money in the fall i started ms cavender s fourth grade class at sherrod elementary in palmer down in the mat su valley my classmates included penny who had a penchant for drawing horses robbie who carried a football themed lunchbox tessa who always smiled and was notably shorter than i crystal who was gorgeous and knew it and becky who was shy and kind and also my closest thing to a best friend i had a little bit of a crush on robbie who probably had a little bit of a crush on crystal my mother taught fifth grade in the same school many of her students are among alaska s movers and shakers now i remember that was the year j j also in my mother s class crashed his three wheeler and tore up his beautiful face he shattered his arm and because of the way it was cast out and up my mother constantly called on him in class i remember him well because he often stayed after to make up work missed from all those surgeries he was the one sweet thread of tentative friendship between that time and some years later after i moved to wasilla and then back again to palmer for high school as a girl who d already gone through two fathers previously i wanted more than anything to be a part of a normal family what i imagined everyone else had i unconsciously believed it fell to me to make the relationship with my new stepfather work and so i became obsessed with irishness which was encouraged in various ways it was a real shame for my stepfather that i was a girl and probably not even of irish descent at that but he offered that i could at least better the situation by legally changing my name to patty i seriously considered this he also insisted that i become a proper catholic so i spent a lot of time dutifully memorizing hail mary for my eventual baptism at st michael s in palmer many days i carefully studied the map of ireland tacked up in the pub while turning that one gaelic word he taught me over and over in my mouth like an incantation fray dee for potato incidentally some years later in high school robbie would ask me hey aren t you irish i was mortified that he remembered by that time i had a different stepfather and a whole new set of pathologies i couldn t have friends out to the lodge not that i had many anyway my stepfather was an alcoholic after all and he ran a bar a constant free for all party it was as my mother once said no place for a child so i learned to embrace my exploration in solitude at that time there was a stand of willow trees on the hill next to the main building it was leveled in later years to make way for a new addition this little forest in miniature was a haven my place to escape from the downward spiral that was our intertwined lives in summer i gathered old boards and put together a small shelter and imagined it to be my cabin in winter i tracked vole and rabbit prints in the snow in every season i d lie on my back in snow or moss or brush and do what i called the big small i d feel myself expanding to the size of the universe and then i d shrink back down to a grain of sand in this way i think i discovered some sense of spirituality in hatcher pass my way of seeing was my one true magic power as for the lodge i explored that too but unlike the natural world around us rife no doubt with dangerous wildlife there was something about that old cloying interior and all of its shadows that frightened me maybe it mimicked too closely my constant and vivid architectural dreams the long hallways lined with doors the unlit crawlspace closets an eerily large and metallic kitchen a bar engulfed in smoke and disembodied laughter and then there was the new addition not the one that would someday erase my trees but another to the right of the main structure it was still under construction when we moved in and it remained in unfinished limbo for the duration of our time there that wing had a skin but inside it was all darkness and bare bones my first bedroom in the motherlode was a closet of a space in the top left of the main structure at the end of a hall of lodgers rooms most of which remained unrented it had one window looking out from the side of the building over the trees and down into the valley below the window was important to me because in nome windows had been a rare luxury there i d had nothing more than a porthole in my bedroom an eight by eight inch cut out up high on the wall that could be opened in the summer months to let in fresh air the new room in contrast held a view of vast possibility one of my stepfather s drinking buddies took a liking to that view as well though and i was relocated to another room and then another the latter was adjacent to the new addition it had a large window but it looked only inside into that great unfinished carcass i felt that i was always on the edge of being consumed it terrified me shortly before my move to this last new room my stepfather invited his sister and her family to come live with us to help out with the management of a failing enterprise her eldest son quickly took up the habit of hunting me with an air rifle in my magical forest and also picking the lock on the bathroom door while i showered whatever safety i felt in my world was crushed they left a few months after their arrival and some time after that so did we we did not move on to better circumstances we simply moved on many years after i left alaska it was my mother who sent me the newspaper clipping describing how j j pulled over his truck one day and took his life on the side of the road he had been a social worker at the time a caretaker of the lost i couldn t believe that someone with that kind of spirit could be broken he left behind a wife and three kids i recognized the name of his wife we d all gone to high school together i sense there are unseen generations who come of age in alaska kids scarred by place and circumstance we all do our best like good alaskans to show no weakness but sometimes we fail even the sturdiest of structures can burn to the ground and though i want to say that i am one of the resilient ones the truth is that i m not i just got through it whatever it was and now i m here i had hoped that i d return someday to the motherlode lodge with my son and daughter i d say i used to live here this place is part of me they d see that big old building surrounded by spectacular landscape and they d think i was lucky i d be reminded that in a way they come from that place too and that every bit of my complicated history led me to where i am now i d walk with them through a stand of unlikely trees we d lie down together on green moss next to a cold clear river glinting in sunlight i d teach them to be so small they almost vanish so vast that nothing can contain them share this share on facebook opens in new window facebook email a link to a friend opens in new window email share on x opens in new window x more print opens in new window print share on reddit opens in new window reddit share on tumblr opens in new window tumblr share on pinterest opens in new window pinterest share on linkedin opens in new window linkedin like loading posted in uncategorized apr 23 clouds in the shape of dragons posted by tracy franz 14 today i am washing dishes as nova scotia fog drifts behind the glass of the window above the sink my five year old son with trembling lip and downcast eyes tells me that he s the one not girl who put pennies into the computer i wanted to tell you the truth mama that is very very bad for the computer i say but thank you for telling me thank you for being so brave he shakes and sobs as i hug him breathe i tell him just breathe his chest rises and falls rises and falls and then it seems a terrible weight unmoors from him seconds later he is zooming around the house with his sister we are dragons he shouts we fly and shoot fire i am 14 or 15 lying in tall grass next to a boy who is both my friend and also the son of my stepfather s friend the son of a presbyterian minister it is summer in alaska in the months before he will move away i am certain that we will always know each other lying on our backs in the grass in this way we are invisible to all but the clouds that move across the sky above us i used to do this when i was a little kid he says i d try to find the shape of animals in the clouds a tiger an elephant a winged beast i know he wants to kiss me but he is too kind to take what has not been given so we hold hands and watch the sky i tell him i wish i were a cloud i wish i were free years later i will write him a letter and tell him a secret and he will not believe me and then for some time after he will write to me again and again but i will never never never reply i should not have told he should have believed i still don t know which is true i still don t know twenty four years old and in my first few months of a new life in japan i have been sitting for three hours with a stone in my hand at the edge of lake ezu in kumamoto i am working out metaphors a single unmoving cloud overhead i think regret is a stone turning slowly in the hand a stone is a story turning slowly in the mind a story is a stone turning slowly in the heart when at last i throw my burden into water the cloud shatters and then reforms as i walk home afterward it occurs to me that it is not people who haunt us only moments of encounter i am 30 and walking a one lane road between rice paddies nearing harvest when the breeze shifts tall grass and i know that i am not alone the grass shifts again and i see them full on a half dozen women s heads lashed to poles the farmers i understand this a few seconds later have fashioned scarecrows from scraps of cloth and mannequins probably throwaways from a nearby salon stylish black hair flutters in the breeze for a long time i cannot move none of us blink when i get home i find that my husband in his fourth month of cloister at a monastery in the mountains has written me a letter he is a new monk or unsui clouds and water he writes i must be supple enough to flow and form and reform and disappear he tells me the story of koi who don t know they are wise and powerful dragons i want to kiss him i am lonely i wonder if we will ever be brave enough to have children i wonder if i would be a bad mother it is a year ago not long after moving to this new country and i am driving my son home from school when he shouts look mama dragons what the clouds are shaped like dragons and the dragons are eating the clouds just a minute sweetie i tell him there s a lot of traffic i need to pay attention right now i need to pick up your sister now the dragons are eating the dragons mama look look why don t you look because i want to get it right and know that i can t i tell him sweetie calm down listen i ll stop right here i ll park the car and you can show me but hurry mama look i slow down pull over shut off the engine cars zoom past us one after another above everything clouds move across blue sky okay where are they show me i can t they re gone now they re all gone they are all gone i look at my son s tear streaked face in the rear view mirror i look at the dashboard clock and then the slowing line of cars filling up the road next to us hemming us in i look back up at the sky i think what do i do now what do i do what do i do my son sniffs takes in a breath let s just breathe mama let s just breathe share this share on facebook opens in new window facebook email a link to a friend opens in new window email share on x opens in new window x more print opens in new window print share on reddit opens in new window reddit share on tumblr opens in new window tumblr share on pinterest opens in new window pinterest share on linkedin opens in new window linkedin like loading posted in uncategorized feb 06 the persistence of landscape posted by tracy franz 2 ever since moving to nova scotia from japan i have noticed in myself a habit of seeing the features of alaska the place where i grew up so there is the pervasive rock and water of this new place but there is also a stretch of imagined snow tipped mountains tracing along an expanse of blue sky i think it is the similarities that trick my brain into seeing what is not there sprawling forests of birch and pine seagulls circling above dark and turbulent seas how can this not be alaska so many elements are the same in japan i never saw the geography of my homeland but i sometimes thought i understood when i did not or i understood in a way that was different from how others understood perhaps this was the cultural equivalent of my imaginary mountains all that i had known before was the backdrop or overlay to my perception of everything that came after so yes i suspect those mountains point to something subtle that i cannot yet grasp this is the obvious explanation of my current visual fallacy a kind of culture shock but it is also a reminder that both perception and time are slippery all is in flux for instance if i follow the arrow of time backwards to the origin of the remembered mountains i see that my memories now include some sense of my husband of my children and also of our arrival to this new country my understanding of the past is set against all that came after so those memories are altered but they feel no less true than when i experienced them in real time or when i remembered them at different times in the years that followed in this way i am an embodiment of context time and space and encounter an entire landscape held in one small human form everything even memory is altered by memory this paradox is truth but it is not the only truth because sometimes i look into vast blue sky and that is all i see share this share on facebook opens in new window facebook email a link to a friend opens in new window email share on x opens in new window x more print opens in new window print share on reddit opens in new window reddit share on tumblr opens in new window tumblr share on pinterest opens in new window pinterest share on linkedin opens in new window linkedin like loading posted in uncategorized jan 06 notes from a year ago after putting boy to bed posted by koun 3 who s up tonight um wolverine from the beginning ok papa ok wolverine was born a long long time ago he s older than grandpa s grandpa where s grandpa s grandpa now he died why because everyone dies i don t want to ...
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