May 24, 2012: Rainy Day

As I write this, Pete is showing one of our dearest and most long term friends our website. (I call it “our” website because Pete posts the dispatches and the photos, sometimes very late at night.) Nancy Fuller is now spending a few days with us. She, Pete, and I are all getting caught up on old news. Our paths haven’t crossed in some time. If there ever was a good day for this, this is it. It’s been raining all day long. Best to be inside, by the wood stove, drinking tea.

Nancy and I have known one another since the mid-1980s. Back then, she and her husband Bill were living a few cabins down from the one I was renting. A year later, Pete joined the fray, and moved in with me. We all lived in a semi-communal setting. The Fullers owned their place. Sean McGuire and his family owned the cabin Pete and I lived in, and as well, the adjacent cluster of cabins. Sean and his father Bert were then in the process of building even more. The cabins were off Cloudberry Lane, so this is what we called the area. Back then, the Cloudberry Community was in its heyday. Since, most who were then renters have moved on.

Nancy, now 86, is incredibly sharp and interested in just about everything. She has been asking us specific questions about Pete and my family – I find myself thinking, how could she remember to ask how people she’s never met, or met only briefly, are doing? She’s also very well read – she’s just passed a book on to me about the early suffragette movement in Seneca Falls, NY. I’m looking forward to reading this. Most importantly, I just like hanging out with her.

Nancy now spends her summers in Fairbanks and her winters in Katy, Texas, with her daughter Emily, Emily’s husband Wa, and her two grandchildren, Jasmine and Jarrett.

We just Googled my name and talked about how strange it is that you can find sites in which someone has cited you. Now people might Google Nancy and make note of the fact that I have written about her.

The world IS, because of social networking, getting smaller. Last night I got an email from Bernie Quetchenbach, who I knew in high school.

Janet, who is my friend Jackie’s sister, told him about my website. This is going so far back that I don’t know what to say to him. People who are friends become strangers and your point of commonality is something you remembered. But what you remember is the past, making it fiction. So after rehashing the past, you either move on and become friends, or you cease contact.

An analogy can be made to reacquainting oneself with an old book. My sense is I have many, many books that I have not yet read, so I don’t reread very many. The same is true of friendships. I don’t often go back in time. Instead, I try to keep going forward.

I hope that the sun comes out tomorrow so that we can all take a drive up to Hatcher Pass. I’m a little bit rain phobic because sometimes when it rains in this end of the world, it does not stop for some time. Most of the animals are disgruntled – Hrimmi is too young to be cranky, but I sense that she would like to be out lying in the sun.

Eh, pretty soon, people will be able to Google Hrimfara. She’ll like this.

Next: 168. 05/25/12: Come here Hossy, Let me Trim your Feet