My Wish Came True

 

It's the little things in life that can really make your day.  My home town in New Zealand has a wonderful climate: lovely hot, dry summers, winters that are cold enough to kill the bugs off but very rarely below freezing.  I'd been in snow once, but had never actually seen it snow until I moved to the USA.  

Living in Georgia doesn't exactly offer up many opportunities for snow, but there have been some magical moments for me:  my first Christmas in the US was white (which finally made sense of all the snow-themed Christmas carols) and my husband and I woke on the first day of our honeymoon to a pretty covering of snow at our cabin in the North Georgia mountains.

I discovered that it can actually snow hard - I always thought it sort of floated down gently until I saw big, fat flakes barrelling down from the sky.  And I saw my own, personal warp speed special effect as I tipped my head back and stared up into the falling snow.  I've opened my mouth and stuck my tongue out to catch snowflakes and taste them and I've giggled helplessly while feeling the cold wet seep through as I lay on the ground to make snow angels.  

My manager at the first job I had here was appalled when he found out that I'd never been in a snow fight, so he took me outside and we proceeded to pummel each other and our coworkers with snowballs.  I've had a total of three snow fights in 18 years - which says more about Georgia snow than it does about me.

On Tuesday it snowed while I was working; processing photos and entering bills into the accounting software.  I looked out my window and saw the neighbour's kids lobbing snowballs at each other and all I could think of was Calvin & Hobbes.  Give me a sled, my stuffed Tigger toy (or in this case, Rocky Dog in the photo above) and I'm there.  Time to head for the hills.

Photography - A Gift from the Heart

HeartsApart is a non-profit organisation that aims to help ease the pain of separation when one member of the family is serving in the military.  Partnering with a force of volunteer photographers, HeartsApart provides military families with the gift of photography at a time when they're soon to be miles from each other.

It was my privilege to photograph this family not long before the husband deployed and to capture this time in their lives.  Daddy and daughter just love to read a book together - and what better place to do so than under a tree bathed in late afternoon light?!

Click to see their gallery on Facebook.

Here's a short video highlighting some of the moments from their family portrait session:

Alaska - Planes from the Inside World

Part 5 in the Alaska Series.  Click here to start at the very beginning - Part 1: Above the Arctic Circle.

I was going to call this post Planes from the Outside World, but then I realised you don't get any more outside than inside the Arctic Circle.  If you follow my drift.  Planes come from towns and cities where people tend to spend more time inside than outside.

The airstrip at camp - marked by moose antlers.

It's amazing how seemingly random sounds can provoke strong emotional responses from us.  I grew up in an area that was not quite urban, not quite country; lots of farmland and orchards around my home town.  So it was a fairly common occurrence to hear a prop-plane off in the distance, mostly crop-dusting but sometimes recreational.  So while I'm not the world's most enthusiastic flyer, the sound of a prop plane has a special place in my heart and brings back memories of hot summer days.  I even wrote a poem about it:

Tiger Moth

A distant plane drones
And memory strings
Stir in harmonic hum,
Long ago days and 
Slow summer haze.
Time was a cat
Stretching languidly
As we lay on our backs
On sun-warmed grass,
Cobalt sky reflected in 
Blackberry-flavoured lips.
We sweetened the hours
With lethargic dreams while 
Time mocked our laughter,
Slinking unnoticed
On small padded feet.
And the days and the years
Walked unmarked, except by  
Dusty lines on our faces 
And sepia memories
Revived by the sound
Of a fading plane. 

Got an A for that one - yay me!  (Which reminds me, I need to enroll for next semester soon...)

Anyhow, back to Alaska.  Apart from a satellite phone for emergencies, the only contact we had with the rest of the world was via the bush pilots.  We were a world away from Fantasy Island but the sound of an approaching plane brought Tattoo's cry "De plane!  De plane!" to mind more than once.  Everyone in camp at the time would head out to the 'airstrip' to greet the pilot and help unload the goodies.

Helping unload and load the plane.

And seeing as it wasn't a quick jaunt to the supermarket, planes usually also meant the arrival or departure of hunters.  The first team we said goodbye to was Jerry and Lisa and it was a sad farewell - they are a great couple and brought a lot of laughter to camp.  The joint cook-tent-crossword-solving effort was an epic event and I'll never look at a crossword puzzle again without giggling.  Jerry's such a good sport.

Jerry & Lisa on their last day in camp.

So now, along with memories of the long, hot, dry summers of my youth, the distant sound of a prop plane also brings to mind a colder, utterly wild part of the world.  Two different hemispheres; the bottom and the top of the world, two different times separated by 'several' years, but still the same 'Great Outdoors', good friends and good times.

Next up:  Bow Hunting in Alaska