I went home for Christmas, begrudgingly. I tried to talk myself out of it this year, for several reasons: plane tickets are a few hundred dollars more now that we live in Rhode Island; my husband is quite possibly going to a really expensive grad school someday so I might as well not buy anything for the next five years; we just saw everyone in August when all seven of us crammed into our one-bedroom house in Utah for two weeks while we prepared for my sister’s wedding.
“I do not need to go home,” I told myself. “It’s too far away, too cold, too dark. It’s Kotzebue, Alaska.”
In the past I’ve habitually described my hometown, while introducing myself, with some sort of variation on this theme: “Hi, I’m from Alaska. But not the pretty part like in The Proposal. Kotzebue is north of Nome and south of Barrow and it’s flat with no trees, moose, or salmon arcing over the mountains to eclipse the sun.” And the usual barrage of questions and answers follows:
“Yes, it’s dark all winter and light in the summer.”
“Yes, it’s cold, like -25 on a good day.”
“Yes, it’s small, I graduated in a class of 26.”
“Yes, I’ve eaten whale blubber, and it kind of tastes like chewing on a mouthful of rancid, oily rubber bands.”
It’s a quiet, remote, town above the Arctic Circle. Like other rural Alaskan villages, Kotzebue has high rates of alcohol dependency, suicide, and apathy. It’s a hard place. My husband, from Southern California, loves Kotzebue in the winter—even the frostbitten cheeks after chopping down the Christmas tree on a 24-mile roundtrip snow machine ride and having to pay $10.99 for a gallon of milk at the one grocery store in town. Kotzebue is strangely exotic for him because it’s so shockingly different from anything else he’s known, while I’ve been conditioned to think nothing of it.
This time, the novelty of roaming around town with a new digital slr camera gave us something to do other than bask in the warmth of the woodstove at my parents’ house. We spent three days trying to catch a glimpse of the sun in the polar twilight. Based on trial and error, we determined that the shot we wanted could be captured around 2:35 p.m., about one hour after the sun just poked up above the horizon before dipping back into an orange and blue haze. When the photo was taken all I thought of was the wind chill that dropped the temperature to about -60 to numb my toes.
It was too cold, then, in the moment the photo was taken, to remember what I never should have forgotten: I was baptized here. Time and distance and years of taking on too many responsibilities than I could manage gracefully made me forget that for some reason beyond my comprehension, LDS missionaries found me in a place where hope sometimes feels like a foreign word.
I look at our picture of the tundra sunset now as a remembrance of things other than the cold: life with my family; the place where I first knew the Spirit’s influence in a moment of truly concentrated, focused effort in a search for divine guidance that would lead me to baptism, to BYU where I met my husband and to temple marriage. The vista of ice and snow now reminds me that even the hard places can leave an indelible mark on your memory, when you share them with the right people.
What does home remind you of? What “I-didn’t-want-to-but-I’m-glad-I-did” stories do you have?
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