KODIAK -- I feel hopeful about the new year, the new president and the daily gains of daylight, but I still fight winter blues after days of slush and rain and wet snow slopping onto the driver's seat. January in Alaska always makes me crave color and light.
When the sun is shining, I drive squinting into the sunlight instead of pushing down the car visor, and I drink my coffee wherever the square of sunshine falls in our living room. I'll drink coffee with my eyes closed if I have to, just to feel the warmth on my face.
As I unpacked the last of our boxes this month, I took special pleasure in putting away our books and kitchen dishes, savoring the color they add to our rooms. In one box I found books of poetry by Pablo Neruda, the South American poet who wrote dozens of odes. Odes to the artichoke, to laziness, his socks, a yellow bird, salt, lemons, his suit, to ironing, to the onion.
Rereading his poems, I admired his enthusiasm for life and words, but I couldn't help wondering if that kind of effusiveness is easier to come by in hot climates. My husband is currently painting over an impulsive color choice that I tried in our laundry room. Bitter orange might be perfect for a tropical beach house, but we discovered that under fluorescent light without windows, bitter orange looks more like raw salmon or blended shrimp.
As I thought about what pieces of everyday beauty I might find for an ode to Kodiak, I noticed that I paid more attention to things like the unique island scent of wet moss, low tide, spruce trees and rain and to the sound of birds and boats outside our windows. Inspired by Neruda and the upcoming Valentine holiday of love poems, this column is my ode to the island, more prose than poetry.
My ode is color collected as random as beach glass, the blue domes of the Russian Orthodox Church, the bright buoys in crab pots stacked around town. The welcome spectrum of cotton bolts on the shelves of our fabric stores or the first bouquet of imported daffodils opening a sunny yellow on my kitchen table. Color appears unexpectedly, like the glossy photos of vegetables in three seed catalogs that arrived on the same rainy day last week.
We woke recently to the year's brightest full moon over the lavender peaks of Three Sisters. By afternoon the mountains were bright white against the pewter sky. At night there is the comforting candle-warm light on the masts of fishing boats. Looking down from the bridge on an evening walk, their light spills over the decks and casts a broken path over the water.
An ode to birds like flame-breasted varied thrushes at the feeder and bold black and white harlequins gliding by Fuller's boatyard. Across the channel, 40 eagles have been solemnly overseeing cod production at the canneries. They're plentiful as pigeons, but we have pigeons here too, inexplicably at home in downtown Kodiak.
The startling wave of gray reminds me momentarily of piazzas in Italy each time I glimpse their flurry of wings before they settle back down onto our low, square office buildings. And yesterday, when my son pressed the audio button for the golden crown sparrow at the Wildlife Refuge Center, summer in Kodiak was tangible, if only for the length of its song.
An ode to all the characters, the old fishermen and pretty young baristas. To the surprising diversity of our classrooms with students from the Philippines and other parts of Asia, the Pacific Islands, Russia, Mexico, and Central America. And the rich island history made up of Alutiiq communities, Russian fur traders, World War II military posts and the fishing industry.
An ode then even to the rain, for easing the strain on deer and our furnaces. Rain that washes away the slush. Rain that assures we won't be overrun with tourists because you have to live here and really love it to see past the rainy days and appreciate all that the island has to offer.
To rain that ended just long enough to carry my boxes of books up the slippery steps, grateful for good knees and words that sustain us through cold winter days and for clear skies that renew and rejuvenate like the spring season we are waiting for.
Kodiak-based Sara Loewen, formerly a teacher and now a student in the Master of Fine Arts program at UAA, fishes in Uyak Bay with her husband, Peter, and year-old son.
SARA LOEWEN
AROUND ALASKA