Places

Okay, so we braved the (kinda) cold to walk to a viewpoint last week.  The first thing I noticed as I looked out over the valley was the color of the sunrise.  A yellow-orange glow bursts over the horizon behind the distant clouds.  These clouds do not look normal though.  They are uncharacteristically three dimensional.  Normally in Fairbanks clouds are very flat and boring, but the sunrise brings this quality to the eye’s attention.  As my eyes pan downward from the sky, civilization comes into sight.  Chimneys belch smoke and cars sit motionless in the parking lot, bringing a great balance to the overall picture: invention mixed with nature.  Buildings eclipse parts of the horizon, but add their own beauty as a testament to man’s triumph over unlivable conditions.  Some might not agree that these buildings are just as natural as the trees and snow.  But how is this different from a beaver’s dam or a bird’s nest?  Since my sources tell me that concrete and steel come from the earth and not some distant planet, they seem quite natural to me.

Now we walk on to the Wood Center.  My first though upon opening the door is “this building seems highly inefficient, and the ceiling is crooked!”  It looks as though the builders dropped the top piece there accidentally and decided that it was close enough.  But wasteful as it seems to have room for an entire floor and only put a solitary table, the shape serves a good purpose.  It brings a new element into an otherwise cubic building.  The diagonal roof and curved concrete supports contrast the right angles of other areas in the building.  From the top of the “tower table” there is a different view of the entire building. It is almost like you could turn the building upside down and have roughly the same shape, but it might make a big mess.

Now we travel back in time to my childhood home.  In my head I play a kind of “virtual tour” of the entire house; The red door opening into the living room, the nasty brown carpet, the rubber marks on the kitchen linoleum from indoor roller blade excursions.  All of my memories of this house are played out in my head as if I was eighteen when I lived there.  I cannot remember being little there, I just have ageless memories.  Some of these memories are like when I took apart the door knob to my room and could not put it back together.  I obviously did this as a child, but no matter how much I think about it I do not feel like I was young when it happened.  Maybe this is simply BECAUSE I try to think about it, keeping the memory growing with me over the years.  Oh well...

For me, home is the people I am with more than a certain town or house.