Not all fun and games

It has been a very cold week here in Bethel. We had temperatures in the minus 20's, and windchills in the minus 50's for almost a week. The pipes at Terrence's office froze and flooded, the pipes in an adjoining apartment to us froze (causing us to lose water) and even the pipes at Subway froze. It makes me feel as though Bethel might be somebody's unstable experiment, can people really live here? Of course people did live here for thousands of years succesfully, but had a very different lifestyle. They survived in this harsh environment without all of the comforts that we have now, central heating, snow machines and electricity to name just a few. I realize that the worst of winter is yet to come, February and March are the coldest months, and the snow doesn't melt until May. I cannot imagine what winter would of been like here even a hundred years ago, how long and difficult it must of been. James and I didn't even leave the house today, with a minus -46 windchill it didn't seem wise.

We are persevering though. We read lots of books and watch a few movies. Jamie bought a dart board with his Christmas money from Grandma Jane. We had some friends over for game night and karaoke on Saturday, and I am learning to knit. Terrence and Jamie are reading a chapter of Voyage of the Dawn Treader every night, and we are starting to exercise more at the teen center. It is a strange feeling when you wake up in the morning and you know that you have to make your own fun, no Children's Museum or Chuck e Cheese is going to do it for you. On days like today you just have to get through it, and dream about summer, which right now seems like a fairy tale to me.

It is strange to actually long for grass, for leaves, for a warm breeze. I thought I knew what winter was, I grew up in Michigan, they do have them there. We thought we were so tough having lived in Marquette for five years, but that wasn't anything compared to this. It has been cold and the ground has been covered with snow for over three months already, and we have at least four more months to go until spring. Yikes! I am hoping that living here will give us more appreciation for the warmer seasons, similar to how living in a wig-wam made us content with even the smallest apartments.

Friends tell us that the summers here are phenomenal, that the twenty-four hours of daylight are intoxicating and there is nothing else like it. That there is, in the end, some kind of balance between the long, dark winters and the amazing summers. We hope to be able to spend a lot of time out on the river, hopefully doing a lot of salmon fishing and bird watching and letting Jamie play outside until all hours of the night (which is still day!). This is truly, a place of extremes.