Where Would You Go?

What moment in time would you go back to if you could? Not out of regret, not to fix something you did or said, but where in your life would you go to feel safe, happy, content? What moment would you relive?

I hope you have so many to choose from. I loved my childhood in Fort Yukon, Alaska, and there are many happy times I remember clearly, like riding in the back of a pick-up, our dog’s ears flapping in the wind; poking the coals of a driftwood fire on a sandbar, the smoke keeping the mosquitoes away. I remember watching the ice go out on the Yukon River, the slabs groaning as they pushed up against each other, the slurry’s hushed shirring as it pushed downstream.

Fairbanks was harder; I had trouble making the transition from village to city life, but there was a time late each winter when my dad would shovel the snow off the roof and let me climb up there with him. The sun was low in the late afternoon and the air was soft in that early-spring way. I stood up there and looked over the rooftops, the McDonald’s Golden Arches on Airport Way, the low clouds on the horizon, and felt something that I hadn’t felt before, something like hope and peace together that made each thing more than it was alone. The coming of spring in Alaska will do that to you.

But the feeling I would go back to, the feeling itself, maybe not the place or time, is one that I remember with sort of a perplexed curiosity, because it was so strong and so fleeting. It happened in early December, 1989, in the weight room at Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts. I had just returned from Thanksgiving break in New York City; an uncle and aunt took me with them, along with my young cousins, to a wedding and to holiday things like the show at Radio City Music Hall.

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