watching your hips move and the cloudy sky

(poppies on the thorofare, looking west towards denali, thursday)
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slept till 12:30 yesterday and spent most of the afternoon with coffee watching my basil sprouts uncurl out of the soil in the row of yogurt containers in the window, until keith came over and we planted peas in anita's greenhouse. the night before, desneige, anne and i danced panorama, where jimmy and woody were playing and keith kept buying pitchers till 3 am. the day had started on an angsty note and too early and flowed into an incoherent jumble of disney and wolves and overheard annoying conversations at black bear, dumb questions from cruise west, and a lot of information on darwin, and i was ready to start drinking and mean it. definitely an interesting trip down the hill when i finally came home.
woke up in cantwell this morning. you can laugh if you want. i am, a little. clouds are hanging so low that you'd never know there are mountains out there, if you didn't already. weekend edition is visiting dhabas in chandigarh and i'm having an intense bout of food nostalgia: chapatis and vegetables from the side of the road. i just put milk in my tea. brian's house smells like bacon.
i went to town last week--wednesday--to try again to get my AK license so i could get cheaper insurance and also to pay someone who doesn't already think i'm an idiot to look at the car. it was rather tedious. i had to get a fake social security card and try to prove that i live somewhere--anywhere, really--and was unable to prove that i live where i do, but after much effort and resourcefulness and telling fairly unlikely stories, i was able to prove that i live somewere that i don't, which seemed to do the trick. i look exhausted, drugged, or incredulous that i had actually completed the process in my license picture. which expires before 2048. arizona is weird.
got back in time for free food at the bake with the girls, and didn't get past healy with the car full of groceries in tow till the next day, after vacuuming juniper and rotating her tires in jeff's driveway. i made some reference to greg brown's line in "marriage chant" about how married people rotate tires and work in the yard, but the joke may have run its course. it's ok. i didn't want health insurance anyway.
then, girls' night at 229, where we spent exorbitant amounts of money on food that was absolutely worth it, and later knit at jodi's, and i snuck away to cantwell around midnight.
salmon nicoise. i have no idea what nicoise is. but you should absolutely try it.desneige, cassalyn, molly, and kate.
a while ago, between the spike and the bake.
anne and me.
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after a lot of somewhat disorienting work earlier this week, i took scottie's bus to toklat on wednesday afternoon, and arrived in time for a pizza making party. all i had to contribute was panorama leftovers from going out with tardy the night before, which i ended up eating sitting in the mud the next day on glacier creek. craig busted out the plastic toklat party fish, and bobby j gave me a pint glass full of wine. the trail crew decided to tube down the toklat from the bridge. i watched with some amusement and then went to sleep, eventually.
in the morning, i played with craig's espresso machine, and when i finally made it to the road, met the elderhostel group with whom i'd spent the last few days, and they crowded around me like little kids to tell me about their bear and lynx sightings. i rode with them to eielson, and then hiked to glacier creek and up to the little lake where, in 2004, janice and i swam with a bear. no bear this time, but a beautiful day.
which brings us more or less full circle. the clouds haven't lifted, and the bacon smell has faded. i should probably head north. but it's so hard to leave the internet sometimes...