My dad spent the night at my sister’s last night, because they we sort of snowed in with the sudden snow squall after dinner and it seemed best not to drive down the hill to our house. Chip has gone deer hunting for a few weeks, and had left on the ferry in the early evening, so I had an Italian dinner– prosecco and gelato. (Don’t tell anybody, but it was kind of perfect. It had been a long election week.)
Today dawned mild and calm, and when the fog lifted, there was sunshine. We have had some big storms here, real weather, blizzards and storm force winds, the kind that shake the house.(The kind I suppose we have all felt shaking the country, and the world.) Today though, everything was still, and milder ( nearly 40 degrees). I opened up the windows and aired the house out and walked without snowshoes down in the sandy strip between the ice piled tideline and the frozen uplands.
Afterwards, I did a Zoom writing workshop with some high school students in Unalaska as part of the Find the Good Alaska Reads program, and the assignment I gave them was to write a letter to someone not in their inner circle, that has made their life better, richer, safer– kinder. I was inspired by one recently published in the Chilkat Valley News, addressed mostly to school teachers, from a young woman that grew up here, but moved away years ago. It was titled “A fifteen-years-late thank you.” I clipped and saved it, and read it to the students, because it’s an example of what the best writing does: moves the heart, and makes you laugh and cry and sigh with gratitude for the great goodness of people. Imagine if we all write just one letter, or postcard even, of belated appreciation, to someone not expecting it?
