At the top

I keep thinking about last year, where we were in the day by day of moving from there to here. I remember eating sweet potato tots on a patio restaurant in South Dakota on the 3rd of July. I remember the sudden swoosh of a Montana road, the butterflies, the shock of color, cliffs and craned necks.

When we drove into Alaska for the very first time, I hadn't put a name to the face of the mountain that made me marvel, not even as we posed in front of it. Denali. McKinley.

I've seen it now a hundred times, maybe more. All it takes is a clear day, and there it is--white against blue--popping up in the second mile of my go-to running route.
Sometimes we take a day trip to get even closer, to skip rocks and peer across the river at 20,000 unfathomable feet.

When friends ask, I tell them we're happy here. We are. Though at times this Alaskan life feels like a caricature, like my husband bringing home salmon he pulled from a net in the Kenai is only playing to the stereotype. Now all that's left is to buy an RV and a husky named Nome. (I admit it--I do want a husky!)

But not interestingly enough, I still manage to be a cliched suburban soccer mom in the last frontier. My car is filthy from carpooling and cleats, and I am carting kids everywhere like my life depends on it. It doesn't. What would happen if I woke up and decided that we could skip soccer practice and medical release forms and gymnastics and school registration and all-women's road races and all the things that keep me driving and running to and fro?
Maybe we'd play a game of scrabble in the middle of the day or drink pink lemonade from the good china tea cups. Maybe we'd go camping, forget dinner and fill up on potato chips and s'mores. That wouldn't be the end of the world.
Maybe it'd be the start of it. 
(For the record, we did all that, and the only regret was not bringing more chips.)

My son loves to skateboard, and I think he's nuts. My daughter loves to play dolls and dress up in frills, and I don't get it, not even a little bit. I love to run so fast it hurts like bloody hell, and no one in the family--not even me--gets that either. But we're all here, doing our thing.

Sometimes, I drag them on a hike to the top of a mountain, and the whole way up is torture. She whines about her legs hurting. And he whines about slowing down for her. And I whine about how much they're whining. And then we get to the top.

And at the top, we get amnesia. We have no idea how our legs got so tired. There's no record of the bickering/whining/dragging of grumpy arses up an unrelenting switchback.
At the top, we use every one of our five senses to taste smell feel hear see the view.
At the top, the trees look so tiny, and is that the forest?
At the top, I shed my status as a stereotype and target demographic. I'm just a person, with my people. And we are all the best kind of alive, at the top.

{Just writing today with Heather.}

In which the trying is the sweet spot

Call it denial. Call it optimism. It's probably both. But there's a place where, given enough sunlight, 37 seems warm and 39 feels young.

There's a sweet spot in every sport, at least that's the theory. In golf, you know it when you hear it, club to ball. It sounds like a hole-in-one. And in baseball, you know it when you see it, or maybe when you don't--because it's already out of the park. As for the sweet spot in road racing--the sport I'm supposed to know the most about-- I'm not totally sure. I'd guess it would be the finish line. Well, unless you puke in the chute. In that case, it's more of a delayed sweet spot, like later that afternoon when you're polishing off a cheeseburger and relishing in proving yourself to be faster and stronger than you were the day before, the year before, maybe than ever.

The thing about sweet spots is that they aren't very big, very often, or very easy to come by.  You have to work so hard to find them, and when you finally do, they're fleeting. You can't put them in a mason jar, poke some holes in the lid and hope they'll last until August.

This week I found myself in a contented striving, the sort of place where you're delighted just for the privilege to try. I ran on bare pavement in 37 degrees on 39 year old legs underneath the highest sun I've seen in months, and for maybe a quarter of a mile I felt strong. Top of the mountain strong. Bow of the ship, I'm flying, king of the world strong. Look me in the eye and tell me I can't, I dare you strong. Of course it didn't last. Of course. But those sweet spots--damn if they don't keep you going through the next one hundred shanked shots. (I'm back to golf again, if you haven't noticed).

I have a friend who's running a marathon tomorrow, and I keep thinking about her, hoping that tomorrow's her day, the day of the BQ. She's the bravest sort of lady, the kind who ignores all the really good excuses and only pays attention to the lofty goal, the kind who lets her heart publicly break in the almost-but-not-quite achievement of a huge PR and a barely-missed-Boston. The kind who duct tapes her heart back together and trains through the polar vortex and goes RIGHT BACK OUT THERE.

The sweet spot isn't always (necessarily) at the top. Sometimes it's in the climb and the burn.

You guys. This is how we stay young, and this is how we stay warm, and this is how we stay alive. We keep striving. We keep hunting the sweet spot. We tell the melancholy and the disappointment and the negativity to suck it. We chase the maybe-just-maybes and the almost-but-not-quites. And in the chase, we get warmer and stronger. We get faster, braver. And who knows if we'll ever catch whatever it is we're after. But we're sure as heck gonna bask in the privilege to try. And sometimes? The trying is the sweet spot.

In which glacial is the new epic {Just Write}

Environmental whiplash. No seriously, it's a thing. I had a severe case of it this weekend when I launched straight from a bouncy house birthday party to a glacier hike. One minute I'm surrounded by screaming banshees and smelly socks and headache-inducing inflatables. An hour later, I'm hiking a frozen lake en route to a glacier. Which, come to think of it, is the cure for just about everything, including environmental whiplash.

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At first, she envied the toddler in the sled with the skate skiing dad. Then, the musher and his huskies. For the whole of two miles, she trudged, springless steps toward this wonder I'd promised at the halfway point. I was talking about the glacier, but she was thinking about the candy. And really, who cares what the carrot looks like as long as she kept walking?

The boys pressed forward faster, leaving us to linger in the long mountain shadow. I listened to her whine of a cold face and a bruised knee, neither of which are remote factors when she wants to ski just one more run. Hiking is all plod and no whoosh, or so she thinks.

I asked her to sing to pass the time, to leave less air space for the complain-plane. She sang her Alaska songs (Fur Rondezvous and Huskies), and corrected me after I messed up the refrain (you say mush TWO times, not THREE, silly mama). The sun found us again, and together we turned a corner in every sense.

There it was. We walked right up to the glacier and said hello. We pulled out the snacks and the camera and our sense of wonder. Perhaps they were tired of my remarks about how incredibly amazing it was to travel this hour in this place, but they didn't disagree. The girl perked up, in fact, started dancing on the ice, pointing out heart shapes, embracing the label I tried giving her earlier when pleading for a faster gait--my "tough Alaskan girl".

::

I could maybe name a few moments in the whole of two hours where there wasn't at least a hint of discomfort. Fingers too cold, bladders too full, stomachs too empty, legs too tired.

But the discomfort is never what we remember. We latch on instead to the handful of minutes when the sun highlighted our hair and the glacier towered above and the icebergs became seats and the four of us were together in this surreal, desolate, wild corner of the world. 

 

I am a day early in this "just write" deal, or six days late is probably more like it. But I think Heather will forgive me just this once.

Hashtag Amazing

Different day, different place, same #amazing moon

I tried to take a picture of the moon as it rose above the mountains from my highly artistic perch in the grocery store parking lot. I wanted to show you. I wanted to say to the lady rifling through the too-yellow bananas in search of the green--I wanted to ask, "Did you see that moon? Isn't it amazing tonight?"

I wanted to post it on Instagram so all of us, all of us shopping for groceries under the same ridiculously bright moon, could agree on the beauty. So you could click the clear little heart for "like" while fiddling with your phone in the express line. All you needed were bananas and milk. So this picture of an amazing moon, well, that would be a bonus.

I live in a place that routinely takes my breath away, be it because it's zero degrees or because I caught a glimpse of Denali under the pink spell of a winter sunset. A mountain hundreds of miles away, and I can see it as I drive home from getting the eggs and returning the library books. How is this even for real? I think. And on I go, driving through postcards. Even if I could take a picture while driving, the picture wouldn't do it justice. Not to the moon, not to the mountain, not to the moment.

But beauty shared, eyes ahead, shoulders beside, is so much richer than a glimpse alone. There's something deep within my DNA, even as an introvert, that cannot see a beautiful thing without calling out to you to come see it too.

When we drove 4600 miles from Ohio to Alaska, we divided our lives and livestock into two cars. (I drove the children, and L got the dog. I'll let you decide who had the better end of that bargain.) We used two-way radios to communicate. We thought we'd just use them to decide on pit stops and clarify directions. But we could barely go 15 minutes without calling out. Did you see that? Gorgeous! Look to your right! Amazing!

By day four, we had a running road trip joke. Whenever we saw something beautiful, we'd ring to the other car and say in our best valley girl voices, "Hashtag aah-MAZE-ing!" It became a thing. The kids chimed in with their adorable little voices and a hundred times a day we were shaking our heads, saying can you believe this? Hashtag AMAZING.

The human condition is this: We need to see the beautiful things to keep from giving up, and we need to see them while standing next to each other, eyes lifted, not staring down at screens. So grab someone near. Tell them to look at the moon or the sunset or an open field or a two hundred year old building or whatever beautiful thing it is that you see with your own eyes. And I promise you, it will be doubly amazing without the hashtag.

Nine {Just Write}

Oh, there are so many things right now. For one, he's going to turn nine this week. NINE. As in almost ten. My baby.

He has glasses now and we just finished Harry Potter number three. We usually read together, but he got so excited that he couldn't wait for me, and he read ahead on the bus. The first thing he said when he stepped off the bus was "Mom, I have so much I need to tell you."

I'm thinking, oh, field trip info for tomorrow or something happened on the playground, but no, he sputtered out a dozen breathless paragraphs, every last one about Harry Potter.

Tonight as we read the last chapter, I didn't hurry. I glanced up at least a dozen times to see his not quite nine year old eyes twinkling in the soft lamplight. I savored each page. Because it's not every day you get to read the last chapter of Harry Potter number three for the first time.

::

This weekend we went chasing the sunset and wound up in a place that reminded us of Maine. My birthday boy named it "Mainetown, because it's like Chinatown is for China people, a place you can go that reminds you of home." He's almost nine, and he's an old soul, and he's my baby.

I'm just writing again with Heather. Because of course.

Countdown {Just Write}

"Hey mom, look at this picture I drew. It's of you competing in Whisker Wars," he snickers. The facial hair jokes never get old to the eight year old. I hem and haw and protest in that over dramatic way that shows I think he's as silly and exasperating as he is adored and treasured.

She races down the stairs, breathless in her quest to tell her brother about an exciting connection. "You won't believe it, C. Did you know, did you know that Wose (Rose Wilder) had, had mah-nonia (pneumonia) just like YOU?"

::

I pick up one of my daughter's friends after kindergarten. She hops in the back, and they're barely buckled in before the stories begin.  My brother this and my sister that. It's a holy, precious moment, far beyond the figurines, as I listen to their tiny R-less voices practicing the art of conversation, trading facts about where they were born and what they like to eat for lunch. "Well, my brother had Mrs. L. for third grade, but for fourth grade, he's going to have a teacher at our school in Alaska!"

::

We sit eating cilantro-infested bean burritos, and the girl announces there are nine days left of school. "You mean nine weeks?" I ask. "Yes! That's what I said. Nine weeks!"

It's hard to believe. Only nine weeks. And today, an email came saying something to the effect of "90 more days until your move." I'm never ready for the countdown to begin. I feel like I'm always on eight when everyone else is saying five. Four. Three. Two....

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I'm in a hurry, but I linger in the aisles long enough to look at the expiration dates on the bagels, the milk, the sour cream. It needs to be fresh. It needs to last. I think back to when I was pregnant and I started to see expiration dates that were after my due date. I used to think about whether I would have a baby before we finished the last of the yogurt. Now I see the expiration dates and I think about packing. And goodbyes. And how my babies are 8 and 6 years old, born so many milk cartons ago. And how I'm never, ever ready for the countdown to begin.

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Just writing today with my fave free-writer, the lovely Heather of the EO.