A Juneau Year
My New Year starts today. This day last year I returned to Alaska. I flew
from Denver to Juneau by myself to start a temporary job at the State Capitol building. Scott
was still in Wyoming and would arrive a week later.
So I can no longer play the ‘Where were we this time last year?’ game. The answer will now always be Juneau. Just Juneau.
A year of adjustments – from not being able to pay $5 for a sandwich to dropping $90 for dinner, from shock and confusion at Fred Meyers to cheese samples and bulk buying at Costco, from general everyday awe to general everyday acceptance. We returned to America and made a giant leap from frugal living to normal levels of consumerism. We do live in Alaska so our perspectives are still somewhat protected from real America, but we reside in Juneau, a far cry from Wrangell’s bubble. I don’t know everyone. That weirded me out when we first moved here – a metropolis of 30,000 means way more people are strangers than friends – but now I’m used to it. A seeming anonymity that one could never attain in Wrangell.
There are the students we left in Tanzania who, while we still miss, seem more and more distant. The students we started Orkeeswa with graduated in November, which was a busy time of year for us. Scott and I would’ve wanted to have written a card to almost every student in that class, but I was only able to write two for my two favorite students. I sent them express mail to a past volunteer who was traveling to Tanzania for the graduation, the flat envelop filled with two lonely cards and a desperate hope that the words inside would communicate what was both written and what was not – a wish that I could’ve been there to see them graduate and an apology for having left in the first place. That past volunteer never received the express envelope so she never got to deliver the cards. A leftover of 2013 – my graduation wishes in mail purgatory.
There’s the fact that Scott and I stayed domestic for a complete year – no stamps on our passport (would we even be able to locate them right now?), no long bumpy bus rides, no talk of when when we’ll cross an international border next. Instead we talk about buying a house. It’s as if we shed our desire to travel when we last entered the country, a coat we just took off and checked.
When we first moved here, we had to establish ourselves. Get a P.O. Box, library cards, friends. The latter has proved the most difficult, but it’s a process that takes far more than a year to sort out, at least here.
In a year, we didn’t volunteer, we didn’t surround ourselves with a foreign language, we didn’t go into a religious institution. We saw live music and ate a lot of burgers. I danced on stage. Scott skied and started a city league basketball team. I was on TV.
We flew to Wrangell and got married on the beach in a combination of rain and snow, our close friends as witnesses. We explored Juneau by foot, a puppy in tow starting in July. We lived in two houses. We cut down our first Christmas tree.
As we’ve been slowly accepting Juneau, I like to think Juneau has been accepting us, but I can’t be so sure.
So I can no longer play the ‘Where were we this time last year?’ game. The answer will now always be Juneau. Just Juneau.
A year of adjustments – from not being able to pay $5 for a sandwich to dropping $90 for dinner, from shock and confusion at Fred Meyers to cheese samples and bulk buying at Costco, from general everyday awe to general everyday acceptance. We returned to America and made a giant leap from frugal living to normal levels of consumerism. We do live in Alaska so our perspectives are still somewhat protected from real America, but we reside in Juneau, a far cry from Wrangell’s bubble. I don’t know everyone. That weirded me out when we first moved here – a metropolis of 30,000 means way more people are strangers than friends – but now I’m used to it. A seeming anonymity that one could never attain in Wrangell.
There are the students we left in Tanzania who, while we still miss, seem more and more distant. The students we started Orkeeswa with graduated in November, which was a busy time of year for us. Scott and I would’ve wanted to have written a card to almost every student in that class, but I was only able to write two for my two favorite students. I sent them express mail to a past volunteer who was traveling to Tanzania for the graduation, the flat envelop filled with two lonely cards and a desperate hope that the words inside would communicate what was both written and what was not – a wish that I could’ve been there to see them graduate and an apology for having left in the first place. That past volunteer never received the express envelope so she never got to deliver the cards. A leftover of 2013 – my graduation wishes in mail purgatory.
There’s the fact that Scott and I stayed domestic for a complete year – no stamps on our passport (would we even be able to locate them right now?), no long bumpy bus rides, no talk of when when we’ll cross an international border next. Instead we talk about buying a house. It’s as if we shed our desire to travel when we last entered the country, a coat we just took off and checked.
When we first moved here, we had to establish ourselves. Get a P.O. Box, library cards, friends. The latter has proved the most difficult, but it’s a process that takes far more than a year to sort out, at least here.
In a year, we didn’t volunteer, we didn’t surround ourselves with a foreign language, we didn’t go into a religious institution. We saw live music and ate a lot of burgers. I danced on stage. Scott skied and started a city league basketball team. I was on TV.
We flew to Wrangell and got married on the beach in a combination of rain and snow, our close friends as witnesses. We explored Juneau by foot, a puppy in tow starting in July. We lived in two houses. We cut down our first Christmas tree.
As we’ve been slowly accepting Juneau, I like to think Juneau has been accepting us, but I can’t be so sure.
posted by Siapiau | 10:58 PM
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