Winter too soon

In Alaska, winter is never quite gone. In June, northern breezes lift from distant glaciers and shiver the bud's tentative green promise. Flowers open hesitantly, schizophrenically, dazzled by sun but stunted by cold as old as permafrost, deep, primordial, mingling with dinosaur bones and mastodon tusks.

This morning, snow slides inexorably down mountains, though the land below is littered with gold, and more gold, shaken like summer rain from trees. The wet smell of what, in early October, is late autumn, hangs in the air like ice crystals soon grown to frost, too soon to grow to whiteness, too soon, too soon, the lament of these days.

Too soon, the cry of Canadian geese, both as they leave and return to this landscape, land scraped by ice, hewn and stacked in mountain and woodland, glanced by light extreme and obscure. Too soon in May's frozen bogs and fields for food to have been ennervated by a waxing sun. Too soon in the mournful gaze of the warm-blooded who huddle in fur and fiber and retreat to dens of warmth and wood and wait, and wait again for the return of life to a land that so often deals death like a beautiful and merciless mistress. "Come to the table," she calls, icicle fingers wrapped round ripe autumn bounty, the memory of endless suns trapped in flesh, in flower, in fruit. "Eat" for winter is long and coming and coming again.