Spring Break
Returns home, past romances and dreams
Rose Hansen
Issue date: 12/2/08 Section: Forum
I went home for Thanksgiving - home being Alaska. Please don't ask me about Sarah Palin. I also do not live in an igloo or travel via dog sled.
Thanksgiving was pretty typical, except we celebrated on Friday because most of the family was out in the woods for the annual deer hunt.
In the movies, holidays are often depicted as a time to be with our alcoholic parents, neurotic siblings, dogs who steal the dinner ham and childhood loves turned into soul-shaking, one-night stands.
I got two out of four. My dog is well-trained. Instead of running into my first boyfriend, I dug up my old scrapbook, which is filled with pictures of my grinning adolescent self and Josh, the neighbor's son at our summer cabin.
I never realized memory lane would be so sweet. It might make me sound like a crotchety old lady to say it, but life was innocent then. We hadn't seen heartbreak. We didn't know what lay ahead. The world was open and grand, and we were going to march on into eternity together.
Having a remote pocket of Alaska as the background to your first love story is pretty hard to beat. We might not have held hands in a darkened movie theater, but we lived bathed in the light of the midnight sun.
I fell in love sometime between running boats up rivers and pulling king crab pots. Our first kiss was under a cedar tree. His equivalent to a bouquet of flowers was a sea anemone shell so fragile that it shattered as I clutched it in my hands.
Our theme song was "The Joker" by the Steve Miller Band. I had the peaches, he shook my tree. We never took our affair past first base.
A lot has changed since then. We grew up and away from each other - summer jobs, new people and college. My parents put our cabin up for sale. I heard Josh developed an addiction to prescription pain killers at some point, but rumors claim rehab cured him. For better or for worse, I'd rather not know. I want him to forever stay as he was: red baseball cap and Levis, cigarettes and fishing pole.
Thanksgiving was pretty typical, except we celebrated on Friday because most of the family was out in the woods for the annual deer hunt.
In the movies, holidays are often depicted as a time to be with our alcoholic parents, neurotic siblings, dogs who steal the dinner ham and childhood loves turned into soul-shaking, one-night stands.
I got two out of four. My dog is well-trained. Instead of running into my first boyfriend, I dug up my old scrapbook, which is filled with pictures of my grinning adolescent self and Josh, the neighbor's son at our summer cabin.
I never realized memory lane would be so sweet. It might make me sound like a crotchety old lady to say it, but life was innocent then. We hadn't seen heartbreak. We didn't know what lay ahead. The world was open and grand, and we were going to march on into eternity together.
Having a remote pocket of Alaska as the background to your first love story is pretty hard to beat. We might not have held hands in a darkened movie theater, but we lived bathed in the light of the midnight sun.
I fell in love sometime between running boats up rivers and pulling king crab pots. Our first kiss was under a cedar tree. His equivalent to a bouquet of flowers was a sea anemone shell so fragile that it shattered as I clutched it in my hands.
Our theme song was "The Joker" by the Steve Miller Band. I had the peaches, he shook my tree. We never took our affair past first base.
A lot has changed since then. We grew up and away from each other - summer jobs, new people and college. My parents put our cabin up for sale. I heard Josh developed an addiction to prescription pain killers at some point, but rumors claim rehab cured him. For better or for worse, I'd rather not know. I want him to forever stay as he was: red baseball cap and Levis, cigarettes and fishing pole.
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