Funny the Feeling of Freedom in Fitting Shoes

Sunday, September 13, 2009

Every Sunday, we’re invited to eat with a family down the street. Our fill of reindeer sausage today. We leave a couple hours after arrival per usual. We walk and I note houses and gardens we go by, the same walk I make from work. Just a day or two ago, I noticed a house I had not noticed before. A domed house. There are a few of them around Bethel. Someone in the 70’s felt the freedom of expression and insulation and put them to good and practical use. Today, my housemate Justin and I were curious enough. We knocked. A fragile young woman opened the door to us. And with some cheeriness on my part, invited us in to peak at the sloping loping ceilings. She apologized for her 4-year-old’s strewn about toys, soon said her husband hides when visitors come, hinted our three minutes to gape were up. We thanked her kindly, slipped on our rubber boots on her porch, and kept walking down Napakiak towards home.

Monday, September 14, 2009

I find my way upstairs to the shelter at work today. I usually do, as it’s my time with people not too busy for small conversation. I volunteered to take a resident somewhere. I wait in the kitchen. I stand by the long table there. I watch with big eyes as two residents, one young, one old, pluck ducks. Donated dead ducks with long feathers. The older one takes the small under-belly soft feathers off first. They kept the feathers in a black garbage bag. To be saved for stuffing pillows.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

I went to court again today. Typically I’ll go accompanying someone in filing a protective order. This morning was different. This morning was a sentencing.

We file in, the four of us attending from work, through the court house doors. Through the metal detector, which I set off every time, because every time, I choose not to avoid wearing my grandmother’s belts that tick it off. We gather our shelled off jackets and wind through the hallway and up the elevator one floor to court room six.

The “victim” was always referred to by her initials. In sexual assault cases, they have that right to anonymity, though people slipped up and said her name at least once. In this town of 6,000, people will know people and people probably already knew what happened with these people. But it’s a right nonetheless.

I sit through this, taking in my first sentencing experience. I keep assuming it will be like Law and Order or some familiar TV show. But it isn’t. The speeches are good, but not TV worthy. As it should be; it’s real life, not TV. Somebody’s life. More than one somebody. And now one somebody is going to jail and the other somebody is known supposedly only by her initials here.
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I walk twenty minutes to work everyday, and twenty minutes home. Uphill both ways, naturally. First arriving in Bethel, I began to dread walking, only because my many year old sneakers hurt my feet. My other ones came in the mail from my family a few weeks in. Funny the feeling of freedom from fitting shoes.




On my walk to and from work, I feel the contentment of small town life. I pass the well-kept, odd looking garden. Blue and purple flowers toppling out of slender metal barrels like someone’s second grade hat made in art class with fuzzy yarn.





I pass where giants played leapfrog and left their fun implanted on the road in scattered patterned potholes. I am passed by trucks and worn out cars with driver’s who have the Midwest small town wave. We make eye contact. Small smile. They lift up three fingers off the steering wheel. I lift my arm up at the elbow. Keep driving. Keep walking.







I turn briefly onto Mission Road, then with my hood up in the light rain, turn my whole body to see the empty road, looking before I cross. Move back behind the green dumpster reading “Private” in sprawled letters. Come to the top of the small slope down, survey the crowded graveyard with white crosses.





Peer down the cylinder carrying water above the permafrost. Hear its goings and its comings.







The path is wetter today and there are bike tracks and shoe prints in the mud. These disappear and reappear every other day as the dirt re-hardens in the long sun. Slackened and firmed up. A familiar process to a 22-year-old in new places. Bethel and adulthood.
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My walk home from work is shaped by the mud I walked over several hours before. I slip on it down a hill just barely, enough though to elicit an “oofta” out of me. A Norwegian/Minnesotan expression. I am neither. Borrowed culture. It won’t be long until Bethel cultures too get into my blood and out through my words, just as the dried mud now never leaves my freedom shoes.

Friday, September 18, 2009

“I hate Casper.” Impending laughter. Our housemate Justin has just returned from a work assignment with Father Chuck. They blessed a house infested with ghosts. Apparently. If you don’t believe it though, the blessing probably won’t work. Justin seemed to take it seriously enough. He certainly thought it was neat. But when Casper the Friendly Ghost is brought up upon his return. Well. Maybe fiction ghosts are different.

Saturday, September 19, 2009

I sit in the intermittent hallway at the back entrance of the cultural center. Here I get wireless and am allowed noise, unlike the library. I sit. I talk. I hear. On Skype (a miracle) with my roommate (from college, not Bethel) and then my brother. Now and again, others walk by. Through that door, then this door. Look at me strangely. Seemingly talking to myself. Or seemingly a confused hunter in my bright orange sweatshirt with a big “I” on it that arrived from my sister early this week, paired with my candy corn leggings. I suppose we’ll each shape our reputations in the small town. But it’s a town of sweatshirts and, well, jeans, not patterned leggings, but the same feeling is there. They pass by with a smile anyway.