Navigating North in November

 Twice a year I travel home to Fairbanks, usually for a month. Up until recently, hubby Don and I always went separately because of commitments in New York that kept one of us here while the other happily flew on their merry way north. This year we can finally travel together; our local commitment’s a thing of the past.

Originally we’d planned on a summer filled with mosquitoes and endless sun. When our NY friends found out we’re both going up together, they all expressed envy that we’d be spending summer in Alaska.

Yet when asked, we found ourselves replying,

 “No, we’ll go up in November.”

The looks that remark netted ranged from disbelieving to confused and back to disbelieving.

“But it’s cold up there in November!” they said. Then we got a few tentative queries of, “Isn’t it cold up there in November? With a lot of snow?”

“Yes. It’s cold in November. And there’s snow,” we replied serenely.

Still no true comprehension. “But you already live Upstate! Why not spend winter in warmth, maybe go to Florida? You may as well stay in New York,” they reasoned.

“Nope. We’re headed north.”

“Well, you’re both crazy.” The conversation usually ended there. Or something similar, depending on which family or friend we spoke to.

I can’t recall the last time I saw a true Fairbanks summer, where the days lengthen so deliciously and the sun’s up and beaming after midnight. It seems I always go up late in the fall or early in the year.

But I discovered something about myself when I was in Fairbanks this past February:

It’s more comfortable there at twenty below than in New York at twenty above.

Winter in Interior Alaska has winter in Upstate beat by a landslide, and all because of two factors:

Wind and humidity. As in - Fairbanks doesn’t have either during most of their winters. And Upstate does. And it makes all the difference in comfort.

When we lived full-time in Alaska it was easy to complain about the winter. Six months of snow will eventually get to anyone, including the avid outdoorsman who owns every winter toy on the market. Cabin fever is real and everyone gets stuck with it sooner or later. But at least for me, I found I missed Alaskan winters even though we ended up in ‘Four Seasons Central,’ otherwise known as the Northeast.

I longed for the Aurora. I missed the utter calm of snow that falls so very silently and clings endlessly to tree branches in a lacy white drape incomparable to anywhere else. Until I’d moved to New York I had forgotten what it’s like to have that bitterly frigid Upstate wind cut through layers of clothing and chill to the bone; damp and just nasty. Not the entire winter in Upstate, of course, but enough. And not even a clear night of dancing Northern Lights as recompense for that wet, windy freeze. It seemed three months of Upstate winter could trump six months of Interior winter, hands down . . . and not in a good way.

But see, family and friends here in New York wouldn’t understand it. Given a choice of region for those wintry months, they’d go to Hawaii, Mexico, Florida, Las Vegas; anywhere south or west that has no snow and winter temps higher than sixty degrees. What would be the point of going north? It’s just more snow.

I simply smile, and say, “Why, yes. Yes, it is.” And I pack accordingly.

This year we’ll head north, stay a month, probably over the holidays. Christmas morning in Fairbanks sounds pretty good to me. As for the rest of the winter, we might just hop in the motor home and drive to Florida. A few months on the beach could be completely doable. Ah, but that month right in the middle? It belongs to Alaska. I’m looking forward to it.

 Char Chaffin is a member of AKRWA and CNYRW, a die-hard displaced Alaskan, and has just published her third novel, Jesse’s Girl. She goes home to Fairbanks when she can, hangs out on a sixty-acre farm in Upstate New York when she can’t, and divides her time between writing her next novel and being an Acquisitions Editor for Soul Mate Publishing.

website: http://char.chaffin.com

Facebook: http://facebook.com/char.chaffin

Twitter: http://twitter.com/char_chaffin

Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5337737.Char_Chaffin

Book Trailer for Jesse’s Girl:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5UBBoAqbWE

Long Cold Lonely Winter?

After my second head-cold, I decided to blame winter on all my ills, bad moods, inability to sleep at night and everything else I could toss on the heap. In the grip of frigid and windy nastiness, it was easy enough to do. I got out the makeshift desk I use when I want to work in the living room, and huddled there with my heavy down-filled blanket wrapped around me. Right in front of the pellet stove. And still froze my knuckles off. I hibernated even more than I usually do, refusing to go outside for anything other than shoveling, haunting the barn for bags of wood pellets to feed the stove, and tromping out to the mailbox. I grumbled, a lot.

This has been the worst winter on record for many regions across the US. Record lows. Record snowfalls. Record winds. Record yuck. Nobody seemed to escape the mess; reports would come in from various family members all over, and it was the same everywhere. Slush in the streets, cars spinning out on the freeway, ice coating the trees, inches of snow on the patio, breath-stealing winter air. And that was just in Atlanta.

Twice a year, I go home to Alaska. I have family in Fairbanks; darling daughter Sue Ann, handsome son-in-law John, and my adorable granddaughter, Faith. I spend at least a month playing Mom/Grandma catch up, and one of my trips invariably hits in mid-winter. Just the luck of the draw, I suppose. Friends and other family members always ask me why on earth I don’t travel north during the summer when Interior Alaska is at its most glorious. Well, this winter I finally had an answer that made them shut up in a hurry:

“My winter in Fairbanks was better than your winter, anywhere else!”

And I wasn’t lying even a little bit.

I landed at Fairbanks International Airport on February 9, mid-afternoon. I’d left Albany, New York early that morning wrapped in a heavy winter coat that I barely took off even on the plane. I wore my Uggs instead of packing them (my feet never got overheated during the entire trip). And thinking ahead to what February in Fairbanks usually meant, I steeled myself for the worst.

I spent the next thirty days with my coat unzipped, my hat abandoned and my gloves tucked in my pockets instead of on my hands. Oh, I’d have had to bundle up if I’d spent any amount of time outside, of course. Yet I took Faith outside sledding one day with no hat and never even noticed the lack.

I basked in the windless calm of a standard winter day in Fairbanks, secure in the knowledge that some things don’t change regardless of what kind of crud “Ma” Nature can splat on the rest of the world. I returned to New York refreshed, energized, and warm.

But not for long, because immediately I caught a cold. Then after I fought it off, I got sideswiped with bronchitis. I’m still coughing and blowing my nose. Go figure.

I guess what I brought back from all of this has less to do with the vagaries of winter and more to do with attitude. I think in some ways you can persuade your body to accept and then believe the opposite of what it expects to accept and believe. I lived in Fairbanks for many winters and I know what February is going to bring to my table: forty below, ice fog, black ice on the roads and the need to plug the car into the nearest available hot box so the engine doesn’t gag and die. What I tend to forget it also brings: calm, clear, crisp, gloriously bright albeit short days and long, snuggle-in-your-jammies nights. In that respect, my month of Arctic was blessedly, familiarly normal.

It’s all the other junk this winter that tossed me for a loop and made me want to stab Mother Nature with the nearest icicle I could break off the rain gutter.

Attitude is everything when dealing with unseasonably weird weather. Maybe you’ll catch the flu anyhow even if you were diligent and took the shot. Maybe this summer will be just as disappointing when it finally decides to show up. Whatever we all get, I’ve decided I’m not going to let it bother me, because we can’t control what mean old Mommy Nature dishes out.

But mainly because I’m headed back to Fairbanks this summer—sometime after RWA and San Antonio—and this time hubby Don can break away long enough to go with me.  ::Happy Dancing amongst the mosquitoes::

We’ll take some time, soak up the long, long days, enjoy our family; marinate ourselves in DEET so we can spend lots of time outside. Maybe we’ll stay longer than a month. Maybe we won’t come back until break up, 2015.

Yep, attitude is everything.

Char Chaffin is a member of AKRWA and CNYRW, a die-hard displaced Alaskan, and has just published her third novel, Jesse’s Girl. She goes home to Fairbanks when she can, hangs out on a sixty-acre farm in Upstate New York when she can’t, and divides her time between writing her next novel and being an Acquisitions Editor for Soul Mate Publishing.

You can find her here:

website: http://char.chaffin.com

Facebook: http://facebook.com/char.chaffin

Twitter: http://twitter.com/char_chaffin

Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5337737.Char_Chaffin

Book Trailer for Jesse’s Girl:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5UBBoAqbWE

I Want To Go Home...

In 1988, I lived in Las Vegas with husband Don, daughter Sue Ann, two dogs, two cats and two hamsters.

We’d just built a house, enrolled Sue Ann in a wonderful private school and I’d started a new job working with Fortune 500 company, EG&G. Life seemed settled and solid. Sometimes I felt as if Vegas might not be the best place in the world to raise a child, but we were a good twenty miles from the Strip. Out of sight, out of mind, I suppose.

Don was retired Air Force and we’d lived all over the place, moving as much after he retired as when he was active duty. When you’re young and you have a family to support—and not any real aversion to moving around—you go where the jobs are.

One of our attempts to ‘go where the jobs are’ landed Don in remote Indian Mountain, Alaska, where he worked for RCA for over two years, coming home every three or four months to see Sue Ann and me (living in Ohio at the time). After deciding we’d had enough of being apart, he’d quit RCA and we’d made the move to Vegas (for the second time, in fact) because of—what else?—jobs.

Four years later we had good jobs, a new house, our daughter was happy and well-adjusted . . . and Don came home from work and said, “I got a job offer today.”

“Oh, yeah?” I was, of course, curious. Don wouldn’t have said anything if this job offer amounted to nothing.

“It’s in Alaska—”

And I immediately interrupted him. “You’re not going back to Alaska.”

“It’s not like that, it’s not remote. This job is in Fairbanks. We can all be together.”

Well, that was the beginning of discussion, arguments, Sue Ann’s wails that she didn’t want to move again, my resistance to leaving our wonderful new house behind, you name it.

Bottom line: Don wanted to take the job, I didn’t want to leave Vegas even though I knew it wasn’t the best place to raise our daughter, and what on earth would we do with two dogs, two cats and two hamsters?

It took a few months, but Don wore me down. I knew if we didn’t go, I’d kind of never hear the end of it (especially if life for any reason went sour in Vegas). And I have the kind of marriage that demands if one of us can make the other happy, even if it’s (kind of) not what we might want to do, we’ll do it anyway, because that’s what marital compromise is all about.

So we went. Sold the house, packed up the animals, rented a huge Ryder truck, and drove it all up to Fairbanks. It took us nine days and along the way I worried about what life had in store for us.

Yes, it was an adventure, and I was always up for one of those. But this was different. This was Alaska, The Last Frontier, so very far away from everyone we knew, both friends and family.

“Don’t worry,” Don said. “We’ll only stay a few years.”

I didn’t know what to expect.
After life in the desert, it seemed as though we’d traded one extreme for another.
I was sick with bronchitis that first winter, when temps dropped to sixty below for weeks on end and one of the heating zones went out in our rented house.
I didn’t like my job.
It drove me nuts to see snow in May.
It worried me that now we couldn’t jump in our car and drive to West Virginia or Ohio whenever we wanted to, and visit our family.

Dumb things to worry about within the bigger picture, which I couldn’t yet see:
Living in an amazing state that gives back to its residents in so many ways. Beauty all around me in a place where Sue Ann was safe, did great in school and dealt with winter far better than I. And Don was happy, loving Alaska. Before I knew it, we’d bought a house; a three-bedroom Victorian replica that reminded me of the houses in my Upstate New York home town.

Two years stretched into three, five, ten. And suddenly fifteen years had gone by since we moved. Sue Ann, now grown into a lovely young woman, met and married a wonderful Fairbanks guy. I had a job I liked and yet, I was homesick for family left behind in Upstate. I wanted to go back.

I won’t get into more detail except to say that we went back. In 2004 we moved to New York and settled on a farm not far from my home town. And it was good for a while, as I reconnected with the family I hadn’t seen in so many years. Don and I started a few small businesses. I planted a garden each spring and canned veggies all summer long.

But a funny thing happened as the years advanced: it didn’t take long for me to realize what Don had known all along: how much Alaska had grown on me, how many times during the day I’d remember small things. Like the way the summer sun would shine on my face at four in the morning as I slept with the blinds wide open. How clear the sky, how fresh the air, how quiet, how serene the world around me, be it June or January.

Most of all, how much I missed our daughter, still living in Fairbanks, happily married but missing her mother and father, too. Phone calls several times a week just didn’t cut it.

Sporadic visits definitely left a lot to be desired.

A fellow Fairbanksian friend of ours once told us you can’t leave Alaska without immediately wanting to go back; that once you’ve lived there, you won’t be satisfied living anywhere else. He’d left, too . . . and moved back, three years later. At the time I think I gave him an indulgent smile.

Now, I know what he means.

Because I want to go home.
--- Char Chaffin

Char Chaffin is a displaced Alaskan who currently plots a return to Fairbanks, in between writing contemporary romances and acquiring and editing manuscripts for Soul Mate Publishing. Her latest novel, Unsafe Haven, is set in Southwestern Alaska and is available through Soul Mate Publishing, Amazon, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble.

http://www.soulmatepublishing.com/search.php?search_query=unsafe+haven

http://www.amazon.com/Unsafe-Haven-ebook/dp/B0097A0NY2/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358413901&sr=1-1&keywords=unsafe+haven+chaffin

http://www.kobobooks.com/unsafe+haven

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/unsafe-haven