….And then my heart with pleasure fills, and dances with the daffodils.
Woodsworth, 1815
DIY Blackout Shades For Alaska Summer Night Light
With sunset before 7a and sunset after 9p now we are reveling on the bright side of our seasonal calendar! As we fast forward toward the near constant light of summer solstice, this ever increasing daylight can make it hard to sleep, and since we’re in a new to us house this year, we’ve got a new set of windows that need blackout shades.
I’m not a house decorator sort of person. I don’t know how and don’t really want to right now, I guess. I definitely opt for practical minimalism if I get to choose. We have a homemade plywood dining room table, I’m saying!! And I love it – it fits in a narrow space and is long enough to hold a bunch of people, or as it often does – all our varieties of projects and room left for the four of us to sit and eat dinner together.
All that to say, I don’t really want long drapes, especially the dark kind that we need to block out light here in the summer – and the winter, actually. (It’s remarkable how much light the snow reflects. I nearly always woke up when it was snowing this winter, in spite of the fact that our shades were pulled down.)
In recent weeks Ethan has been getting up earlier and earlier, Ryan’s been waking up exhausted by his nights of light sleeping, and David’s much needed Saturday morning sleep-in was basically a full sunshine bath by 8a.
So what to do? I wasn’t eager to spend money on curtain rods and light blocking curtains because I’m not a huge fan of the result – so much material hanging on the wall! As a stop gap measure, we thumb tacked the curtains from our last home to the perimeter of the windows and sure enough, like magic! We quickly became a much more rested, much nicer family. But thumbtacked curtains aren’t a solution. They’re a pain to put up, a pain to pull down. Sometimes literally.
So….then. Cardboard and Gorilla tape! BAM! Pull the shades over that and it’s Sleep Great Dark!
The rest of us were instantly jealous of Ethan’s room, but we were out of cardboard now, so David made a trip to Lowes and classed it up a billion degrees for the rest of us with fiberboard and knobs.
Slide them in at night. Pop them back out in the morning. This. is so good.
February Snow
After a several low snow months here in Anchorage, February delivered! We were more than 2′ below normal in snowfall at the end of January, but then came the snowiest February in six years. A fun fact because that was also our family’s first February in Alaska – back when we thought we had moved into a magical snow globe where it was all skiing, and skating, and cold!! Subsequent years have proven….not so much.
Our family likes the snow. For one thing, it brightens the long dark winters! When people ask me how it is to live up here in the deep dark of winter where the winter solstice sunrise is 10:15a and sunset is 3:40p, I always say – the snow helps!! Snow reflects moonlight and streetlight. It illuminates the landscape. It’s also bother. It needs shoveling. It makes a shopping cart in a grocery store parking lot difficult. Its relation to ice means there is scraping. And slipping. It is a mess in the melt. Yet we rejoice with every new snowfall (until April and then I’m soooooo done).
February 2018 gave us much to celebrate.
We skied.
(And skated).
And shoveled.
And scraped.
The city plowed. And hauled snow.
We pushed little cars out of stuck in the snow.
We watched sled dogs run.
And the Fur Rondy Parade.
We rode bikes.
And we walked.
We skied (and skated). We shoveled and scraped some more.
And also…..we grilled.
Light That Shines In Darkness
This morning I was making coffee in the kitchen when I heard Ethan flipping light switches in the next room. A little bit later he came to the kitchen and grumbled, “These lights are weird. I can never figure out which switch turns on which light.” My thoughts EXACTLY.
Recently I’ve noticed my irritation when all too often I flip a switch and get no light. I walk a few steps to a different switch and flip it only to produce light in a totally different part of the room. So then I walk across the room and try again with a different switch. Now the light that I’ve just turned on goes dark. And I still don’t have the light I wanted. Every once in a while, I get lucky and the lightbulb I want comes on with my first flip of a switch, but more often I give up in exasperation and just carry on, using whatever light is available.
Why – after nearly 2 years of living in this apartment – don’t I know the switch-light relationships?!? And then I realized, it’s because I go for days, weeks, months without using them! Living at this latitude means we have a long stretch of summer days and nights where it never gets completely dark.
But in the rhythm of seasons, there comes time to pay the price for the seemingly endless summer light, and that time is now. We lost nearly 3 hours of daylight in September and we’re continuing to lose at a rate of about 5.5 minutes per day, on pace to lose another almost 3 hours in October. When we first moved to Anchorage from Oregon in the fall 2012, David made me a graph to compare our sunrise/sunset times with Portland. Right now we are sliding down maximum slope, straight into the deep dark, cold winter and I feel dread rising. It started at the edge of a September sunset while I watched the sun slip behind the mountains, leaving glorious colors of sky to fade into the black of night. It dances with my memories in the chill air of season’s change.
Dark was once cancer in my brother’s body. Dark is death. The loss of a grandparent. A friend. A dream. Dark is a move miles and miles from home. It is marriage in turmoil. It is a miscarriage. Again. Dark is the loss of a job. A career. Uncertainty. It is pain. Dark is anger. Anguish. And grief. Dark is a broken body. In the hospital. Alone. At night. Dark is parenting in moments of fear. It is a lump. A test. A waiting room. Dark is the blank spots in my brain. The terrifying holes I fall in.
“I don’t want this winter!” I proclaim in futile protest. “I’m not ready. It’s too hard. Too cold. Too dark.”
But this evening I pull on my hat and my gloves. And walk into the fading light. I crunch through frosty leaves and icy puddles. Winter is coming. I can feel it. The deep, cold dark. I flip switches that may or may not produce the light that I want. And yet. In a Gospel of John + Barbara Brown Taylor mashup – these words: “There is a light which shines in the darkness, which is only visible there.”
There is a light which shines in the darkness.
This is the light that I need.