Happy New Year!

It is winter today. Saturday it felt like spring. Who knows what tomorrow will bring. From June 1993 until June 1996 our family lived in Anchorage, Alaska. It was a tremendous experience to live in “The Last Frontier” for three years. There, we experienced winter from early September to late April. The boys learned to ski, skate and play hockey. We lived through one winter with 120 inches of snowfall. I spent a month in Fairbanks where the temperature never got above minus 30 degrees. We enjoyed the winters after we adapted.

The summers were glorious with almost continuous daylight. We rode our bicycles along trails throughout the city and along the coast. The boys and I hiked the Resurrection Trail across the Chugach National Forest. We rode in a car loaded on a flat car of a train, past seven glaciers, through tunnels to a town that was served only by rail. We saw some beautiful sites. We walked across glaciers, skied past moose and fished for salmon in Resurrection Bay. It was awesome.

We saw the Aurora Borealis overhead when you could hear the electrons popping. We watched the start of the Iditarod Sled Dog Race. We watched Independence Day fireworks when it wasn’t even dark.

Looking back, we will always cherish our time in Alaska, but when we had the opportunity to return to Arkansas, we took advantage of it. During three years very close to the top of the world I saw more snow than I care to remember. When we returned, I resolved to take advantage of the occasional warm days of Arkansas winters. I resolved to wear shorts outside at least once every month, just because I can. Last Saturday should have been my day for this month. I missed it. As I looked outside today I saw icicles on everything and had no desire to venture outside in shorts. Thank goodness there will probably be another warm day before the end of the month, maybe even before the end of the week. Don’t you just love it? I do.

I moved back to Arkansas because I wanted to. The first thirty-five years of my life, I lived in Arkansas because I was born here. The past thirteen years I’ve been back in Arkansas by choice and that choice has made all the difference. Being away for a time as helped me to appreciate life here much more than I ever did before.