2 Love Stories

So this post has nothing to do with my wild and crazy Alaskan adventures though I do hope to publish some of those soon because they have been happening, despite the LACK OF SNOW! All you lower 48ers have taken our snow this year! Instead this post tells of 2 people in my family and a little bit of the life they walked.

Story #1:

Last year on January 17, 2009 someone very near and dear to our family pasted away, she died on her 110th birthday and lived a wild and courageous life growing up on the plains, moving to Oregon and then Wyoming to live and teach 50 years on Indian reservations. Her name was Aunt Monnie, and she had 4 sisters. She was my great aunt. She never married. She loved horses, had beautiful penmanship, loved fashion, and a fabulous story teller, up until even the day that she died. She stood at 4'9'' tall and weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 pounds and her shoe size was that of a child.

This winter I made earrings for each of her nieces and gave them as Christmas presents in remembrance of her life. Here is a photo of the earrings. The earrings were made out of a necklace that was willed to my mother when she died. I wish I had taken a photo of the necklace before I disassembled, ah retrospect. It was a multi-chained necklace made mainly out of coral and had these birds, frogs, and turtles as the accents. It was much more elaborate than anything I have ever worn and it was just one of many of her pieces of jewelry. She was always dressed to the nines, up until the day that she died.


Story #2:

Aunt Monnie only had one sister who was married, Dorthy. Yesterday this love letter for Dorthy, written by my great-grandfather, the man that she would eventually marry, arrived in my inbox from my Aunt Bird. It was written in 1925 to my great grandmother who apparently was living in Oklahoma at the time. The letter was written from Flat Rock, Tennessee. Obviously Dorthy returned my great grandfathers sentiments, at least eventually. Someday I hope to hear the rest of the story. You can click on the photos for a larger image. Enjoy.

Born to be a rockstar!

When I was home for Christmas Aaron looked through all 20 of my childhood photo albums, he then preceded to pull out his favorites and try to find just the right lighting and angle to take descent pictures of them. This particular photo was my favorite of his favorites. It is a picture of me, my little brother Joseph, and my dad. It make me happy to see this glimpse of one of my favorite childhood memories, listening to my dad sing his songs. Often times I hear myself still singing along to those same old tunes he used to sing, and now I find myself sharing them with my friends. Maybe I wasn't born to be a rockstar, but I know I was born to sing and make music with friends.

Bear Mountain

Above the trees
reaching for the apogee
staring at the sea
vividly
joie de vie

Roommate Trip

Our paddle out

Emily Buck with our whale friends

Whale Tail

The roommates with the whales

The river before the trailhead

Sunset on Salmon Lake

Old Growth

The crew

Sunset on our return

Last weekend we took a roommate boomsham in our new kayaks, 3 out of the 4 of us purchased kayaks this past fall. The kayaks have opened up MANY adventure doors and our accessibility is now 10 fold what it once was. This past weekend it was to the salmon lake forest service cabin. To reach Salmon lake we took a 6 mile paddle out to trail head and then a 2 mile hike to the cabin through an old growth forest. Before we hiked the trail to the cabin 2 humpbacks decided to put on a show for us, one word... AMAZING!

And a thanks to ... Emily Buck for her fabulous photography. She makes nearly all my blogs possible.

What did you do for Thanksgiving?

While the Bradford extended family gathered on the SC coast I also found myself on a beach this Thanksgiving season.

However instead of driving in a car and a staying in a fancy house (not that either of those things are bad) I took a troller, then a seven mile hike across Kruzof Island to a remote cabin with no running water and a wood stove as its source of heat. Instead of sharing the beach with hundreds of other travelers, it was a private beach with the only other people inhabiting it being the nine other people in our party.

While there other than eating the events were many: writing a Alaskan Ballad, endlessness songs, long romantic walks on the beach, giant swings, and having my friends wade through freezing cold 5 foot water at high tide trying to get across an estuary. The culminating event was a fiesta pizza from our local American, Mexican, Italian restaurant.

kayaking with whales

You know you're in Alaska when...

You walk up to a group of boys on the playground, one who is lying on a snow mound with his tongue hanging out and ask curiously, "boys what are you up too?" and one urgently responds "We are playing search and rescue, Brain got caught in an avalanche and is buried in the snow so we are digging him out!"