It's finally snowing! It has been so rainy and inky dark that I missed my own driveway twice this week, and once, the turn off from Small Tracts to Mud Bay Road. (Luckily Greg has plenty of Christmas lights up so I turned around in his driveway.) The little kids winter concert was perfect-- full of carols and old songs and they sang one in German and another in Spanish, and played ukuleles too--

I sent the draft manuscript off of book # 4 yesterday midday, and the plan was to clean my house and my desk, and I have sort of, dumping all my notes for the book  in a big box to save them for the editing process in February and March, but I can't do a thorough mucking out of my writing stall yet as I have an obituary to write for our dear Miss Maisie Jones, 95, who died Sunday morning early, peacefully, after basically taking a really long nap for the last year or so.

Alaska is so large that, when a properly scaled map (not the mini- version that has us floating off the edge of California in a box about the same size as the one Hawaii is also in) is superimposed on a map of the lower forty-eight, it extends to every border, and  pretty much covers the entire country. Haines is over 500 miles as the crow flies, 800 by road, and mountain ranges away from Anchorage. Juneau is too, and Dutch Harbor, where another daughter lives, is about 800 miles in the other direction out on the Aleutian island chain. 

"Give all that you can while you can, with whatever you have to give.Don't hold back, but throw your arms wide open... give and give again while there is still time. You are not here to be a museum, but a carnival."  -  Former Alaska bishop Steve Charleston.

I tossed kindling on the coals and they lit, fed the dogs and let them out and in again ( it's 40 degrees and raining), poured my coffee with cream and composed a Haiku on Olive, my new-old typewriter. The radio was on, Morning Edition from far away-- the NPR studios- and from nearby. Amanda is up the hill at KHNS in the Chilkat Center, reading the school lunch menu and the ferry schedule, waiting for the sun to rise, too.

So I type:

The California Fires

“Aren't the clouds beautiful? They look like big balls of cotton... I could just lie here all day, and watch them drift by... If you use your imagination, you can see lots of things in the cloud formations... What do you think you see, Linus?"

"Well, those clouds up there look like the map of the British Honduras on the Caribbean... That cloud up there looks a little like the profile of Thomas Eakins, the famous painter and sculptor... And that group of clouds over there gives me the impression of the stoning of Stephen... I can see the apostle Paul standing there to one side..."

"Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love."-- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (From the back of St. Michael & All Angels All Saints Sunday leaflet.)