A Few Fraudulent Days

An honest July afternoon

July launched an endless shower, as every true Alaskan July should, but this week deviously ushered in light clouds and blue sunshine. As my marathon training carried me through the Anchorage trails, my plodding feet surged in heat, even in the shade of the trees and soft ground. When I came upon a lake filled with splashing children and merry water, my feet decisively guided my steaming body to the edge of the pool. I must get new shoes, I thought, as—eager for the cool water—I hurriedly removed my shoes, shedding disintegrating stuffing with my left ankle and catching my right heel on a gaping hole where the lining had ripped.
I ran home briskly, unconcerned by the soaking, clinging shorts and the T-shirt which had stretched from an S to an XL.

Jumping pictures in Girdwood: fail

There is a fire-escape outside my room. I call it my balcony though it's hardly wide or comfortable enough to sit on. For the next half hour it gathered the afternoon sunshine around my drying, worked body. I wasn't the only one caught between an eagerness for sunshine and a desire for cool. Across the green, I lazily noticed a man in his third floor apartment. He stood confidently in the wide doorway. He would have appeared naked but that his belly wasn't quite large enough to completely hide his white Hanes which peeked sharply from beneath a slowed metabolism and a few too many beers. He suddenly noticed me but pretending not to, made a casual scramble to the cover of the window. I tried not to laugh and carried on with my quiet joy.

4 July 2013

The tip of Mount Marathon is near the hand
at the top left of this photo

Favorite meal of the year.

In January, I paid my dues and placed my name in the raffle for a chance to run the Mount Marathon 5K on July 4th in Seward, AK. It's where I have celebrated the last three Independence Days (read FunSunandSalmon for my first) and where I, perhaps unrealistically, hope to spend every July 4th henceforth.
It was a struggle, getting everything/everyone together for Seward. But it happened. Of course, it rained on our drive from Anchorage, it rained on our sleepy tents, it rained on our sputtering fire, and it rained on our steaming plates of halibut, carried delicately and proudly through the enthusiastic booths and crowd.
I did not win a place in the dangerously thrilling 5K 3,000 feet up Mount Marathon and 3,000 feet back to main street. As we watched the runners dash eagerly towards the base of the mountain and then labor with blood and dirt through the cheers crowding the finish, my desire and eagerness to try again for a chance to run with these…heros, these men and women who dare to exchange blood with rock and mountain, returned with an increasing heedless resolve.

Mom was here for a month. Our camping trip to Seward was the last thing we did together before she boarded her plane to Dallas.