Looking out the window this morning, I noticed a light dusting of snow on the hills near our home. It grew incredibly cold last night, even though earlier that day rain slammed down with a vengeance. The cats were also on the warpath, racing through the house chasing each other. I thought perhaps they were acting crazy because a new stray has arrived outside but now I realize that they were responding to the change in the weather. Squirrel, my twelve- year gets grumpy during the colder days as arthritis has settled into her bones. Her growls echoed through the hallway any time the kittens scampered near.

Seeing the snow makes me miss Alaska (but not that much). Even though the snow is beautiful when it is falling, shoveling all that snow became tedious and when the temperature dropped shoveling snow wasn’t an easy task. But the adventures we had when the weather was warmer; on our “first date” (we met through a personal ad years before the Internet was even conceived) Mike presented me with a serious lecture on how to catch fish in Hidden Lake. Perhaps he thought that a Southern Californian girl had no knowledge how to bait a hook correctly or perhaps he thought the only fish I was capable of catching came with Star-Kist label attached. But, at any rate, he carefully prepared me with an elaborate lecture on how to catch fish and when I finally was able to get him to relinquish one of his coveted fishing poles, I baited my hook, cast out in the middle of the lake (we were in his Bay Runner) and immediately snagged an eighteen-inch rainbow trout! The look on his face was priceless when I reeled that sucker in!

He decided then to take us to Seward (I was spending two weeks with him) and we launched the Bay Runner out of Resurrection Bay and motored out into the middle of the vastness and dropped our lines. How fortunate that we dropped our bait in the middle of a school of feeding King Salmon and we hauled in enough fish to stay safely in the limits set by Fish and Wildlife. In the middle of this excitement, something swooped overhead and I looked up to see a Bald Eagle circling. There was no land in sight, so this magnificent predator landed in the water and began to swim over to us. Color me stunned, I never thought about whether an eagle could even swim. Mike whipped out his fish knife and carefully chopped up some salmon and we tossed this sushi treat towards that big hooked beak.

Even in the wintertime, we shared incredible adventures. Standing in the middle of Iggi Augi and listening to the gentle chimes of the Northern Lights in an impressive light show overhead, stumbling onto a coven of Ptarmigans, perched on a snow covered tree. The birds resembled snowballs until we startled them into flight. Waking up in the early morning to the phone ringing as Fred our neighbor across the road informing us there was a moose on our porch. Sharing times with our friends Renamary and Vern at the Talkeetnea Lodge…

So I look up at the snow creeping closer to the hills and make a mental note to fill up the firewood catcher on the back porch, finish weatherproofing the outside enclosure and put out clean dry straw for bedding for the barn cats. I continue to look out at the back pasture. The long, tall grasses are drying to a delicate brown and the orange and yellow leaves mix to create a kaleidoscope of colors. I notice the grasses rustling and much to my surprise and delight, I see a big buck rise out of the grass where he has bed for the night. He gently shakes his head and I see his breath playing in the mist. To add to the moment, two does rise from the grasses. The herd turns and heads for the trees. I strain to see them but they are camouflaged well. As they vanish, I send a prayer that they will be safe from hunters’ guns and other predators and will return again to share our pasture and help start my day with a smile