My memories, once fresh, grow hazy and dark. Is everything as I remember or a product of my imagination. It doesn’t seem possible that just a year ago I was walking, waist deep in snow, to work.
On occasion, I would run late because the bus would have to stop for a moose in the road. Some friends would cross country ski to and from work. People from the “Outside” ask me, still, if I lived in an igloo. Sometimes I tell them I did.
Never in my life have I lived somewhere where the mountains surround you at all times, where the wind whispers tribal secrets and the radio plays native music. Alaska truly was another world, one that I was lucky enough to have touched.
The summers are short and fleeting, but beautiful in ways that I cannot describe. The winters wrap themselves around you completely and choke out the sun. On a day after a snowfall all you see for miles is white, even the horizon is coated. It gets so cold your hair freezes and becomes white, car doors freeze shut over night if not tended to properly. You can get so cold you feel you will never be warm again and there is only one road out of Alaska and it takes you to another country before you can get back into the States again. Alaska is what fairy tales are made of, or what they hope to one day become.
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