The news from here on lower Mud Bay Road is a strange mix of local and universal, as the nature of care giving allows more time to click and view online, as well as time to watch the World Cup and the Tour de France, and listen to the radio and text with family and friends far and near. This morning they all kind of converged in one of those weird ways when Chip and I were talking about the children on the Texas border crisis and I had a note from an old high school friend who lives down there. Then I scanned facebook and saw this terrific short film about Haines own puppeteers (their home base is farther down Mud Bay Road.) Out in the garden and on the beach the strawberries are ripening, the salmon are running, and the neighborhood fishermen are away for a bit, down closer to Juneau this week, so my daughter next door is on her own with the babies. Chip is working split shifts at the lumberyard, as this too is his busy season, three hours in the morning and then returning 3-5:30 or so. Midday is lunch and nap time, and I am the enforcer and the driver. Yesterday Caroline Cooper helped me, but today I am supposed to be writing my first column for the new paper that was the Anchorage Daily News and the Alaska Dispatch and I’m still not sure what it is now called. I do know the column will be in We Alaskans, the old Sunday magazine will be revived. That’s a good sign, since that was the place I got started with this whole writing thing way back when. My new editor wants to know what’s happening in Haines. As I said, the berries are ripening, the salmon are running, there has been a little flood in Klukwan backyards on the river. The rain last weekend was epic. The ladies are hiking the Chilkoot Trail this weekend, I was supposed to go, but plans changed. The road by the library is still under construction, but it’s not so bumpy anymore. Dr. Feldman’s house is for sale across the road, he’s retiring to Port Townsend. I hope he’ll still take out Chip’s staples. And I will miss having a doctor who tends us and our dog and whose office is in his house and who is also his own receptionist and nurse, and who sometimes plays the concertina on his porch on warm summer evenings. Sarana has set up a bigger yurt down at the yoga center, and she still has space for the July 18 workshop weekend. Mechanic Ron Sloper is on his way home from Anchorage following treatment for a terrible bacterial infection, thank goodness he is on the mend, the family across the road have a new dog named Lucy, and they are still under construction on the addition next door, but my neighbor Fran says she can see the end. The tower on the Parade Grounds is a beautiful thing to behold, and the borough assembly is having their shortest meeting (at least the agenda indicates that it will be) in about two years, it seems, tonight. Now the question is, what in all of this, may make it into an interesting column?
