Moose Stew

Nine above. Sunrise: 9:10 am / Sunset: 4:45 pm.

We were blessed once again with unseasonably mild temperatures today. Days and nights have been mostly clear all week and you can almost feel the days lengthening. I’ll begin the posts with sunrise/sunset times for a while so you can see how much daylight we have.

Tonight our friends Jim and Susan invited us to dinner. Moose stew and homemade rolls. Wow, I’m sorry you missed it! Susan is Athabascan and our school librarian. She has been one of our closest friends since we first arrived. Jim hunts and traps, and he showed me a collection of pelts he is drying – wolf, fox, lynx and wolverine. He is a truly remarkable storyteller, much like Lindsay’s dad, and every time we get together I find myself wanting a tape recorder. It is impossible to go home after visiting with Jim and Susan without feeling better about yourself and the world because the evenings are always richly laced with humor and friendship.

I am a bit sad that we are on this inexorable march toward spring. I don’t want my first Arctic winter to end. And yet, with the onset of this warm spell, winter has taken on an anticlimactic feel and ninety days from now mosquitoes will be hovering about instead of snowflakes falling. Well, three months is still a long time, and I hear the Alaskan summer is beautiful. We’ll just have to see…