Exactly Eight Weeks

In exactly eight weeks I leave San Antonio and return to Alaska after 37 years away.

I left the north a few weeks after I graduated from West Anchorage High School. In those years we had several native students from remote villages who were hosted by families in Anchorage. A kind of ironic foreign exchange program for Native Americans. One of the students was a boy in my art class that I became friendly with. As a lost Texan in those far norther climes I must have seem an exotic and strange creature to him.

At the end of the semester I was growing more excited about returning to Texas and happily anticipating the trip home. This young man, who's face I remember clearly but his name I've forgotten, listened in a quiet thoughtful way to my chattering about returning to Texas. He said to me, "Yes, you will go home but someday Alaska will call you back. You will hear her and you will return."

At the time I couldn't conceive of ever wanting to go back to Alaska, but Alaska has called me back. Over the past year and many months I've found my thoughts and dreams turning north as if magnetised like a compass needle. I'm almost ready to go.

Mush y'all