On approach to summer

Spring is a strange season in Interior Alaska. There is still snow on the ground, yet you’ll see people out in shorts. Mud abounds and puddles are everywhere. It’s probably the “ugliest” time of year with all the trash along the highways, gravel on the roads, the mud mud mud, and the bracing light of more than twelve hours of sun glancing off every dirty snowbank still holding on. But spring does hold a special sort of magic—the magic of the almost, the nearly, the soon. It’s almost, nearly summer.

The magic of summer is that anything seems possible. Or, at least, in the beginning of summer it feels that way. The chokecherry blossoms waft their heady scent around, we’re up to sixteen hours of daylight, and you start to think that you can get that entire to-do list done before the snow flies, and you will be able to take all those camping trips, and for sure you’ll finish that maintenance on the homestead, and…the list goes on. It is always a long list for summer, fun and chores and trips and where all those meet (fishing), and inevitably, with our short but so sweet summer, not everything will happen.

I’ve lived in Alaska for over twenty years now and I feel I am no closer to figuring out how to complete my summer list. In fact, it just keeps getting longer. Will this always be the way of things? Will I someday learn the perfect prioritization of all my desires and duties, or will I be forever doomed like most Alaskans to have that ever-expanding to-do list? At least I am surrounded by beauty.