Elise Sereni Patkotak

When I lived in Barrow, fixing up my yard for spring meant removing all the debris that had accumulated over the winter and been hidden by the snow.  My yard was considered finished when everything had been neatly piled onto wooden pallets to keep it all from rotting.

It’s not as though I ever planned to throw any of that stuff out. You never knew when a friend would need a part for something mechanical and/or motorized. There was always the chance that part could be found in the pile of rubble so neatly aligned each spring.  A yard cleared

It’s probably a common nightmare. You wake up, look at your clock and realize you’ve overslept and you’ve missed your flight or exam or blown a critical job interview. There’s that feeling of hopelessness as you realize there is no way now to reach your destination on time.  Well, I’m here to tell you that I recently lived that nightmare.  Even more importantly, I survived it.

I was on my way back from the East Coast. My plane departed from the Philadelphia airport at 6:33 AM. My sister lives in Atlantic City, which is easily an hour from the airport.

When God wanted to send a message to Moses, he used a burning bush. When my mother wanted to send a message to my sister and me, she sent a burning obituary.  I think it’s fair to say we were more freaked by our sign than Moses ever was by his.

It happened the day of her funeral. We had gone to the funeral home to make sure she looked ok.  Mom had spent a good deal of her last years on earth giving us very specific instructions about how she wanted to look at her funeral.

Among the many

Buying a piece of fruit in the bush is always an iffy proposition. You might luck out and get one that ripens to sweet perfection within a few days.  It’s more likely you’ll get one that will go moldy long before it turns sweet.  Or it will soften up, look beautiful and taste like a piece of wet cardboard.  Having grown up with Jersey peaches as my birthright, I find that the only way to survive these fruits of summer is to close my eyes while I eat them and use every ounce of my imagination to conjure up the

When the not guilty verdicts were announced in the Amadou Diallo case, a friend called me to ask what I thought.  He assumed I would be outraged at the miscarriage of justice.  Perhaps something in my 60s past, or my known antipathy to guns, caused him to assume I would react this way.

But I didn’t. I had followed the case closely enough to have some serious doubts about it.  Most of all, though, I found the words “split second” going through my mind again and again. Under some pretty tough conditions, in a society obsessed with guns, on streets

When I was growing up there were certain rites of passage that were fairly sacred to young womanhood.  One of them was buying your first pair of high heeled shoes.  Or, at least a somewhat reasonable facsimile. The first pair was inevitably a compromise between what your mother considered a suitable height and what you considered a suitable height.  The difference amounted to only an inch or so in physical reality but in psychic reality it was about a million miles.

I got my wish in 8th grade when my mother allowed me to purchase a pair of shoes with

I’m a volunteer at Bird TLC.  It’s a place where injured birds come to be healed. We see everything from the smallest chickadee to the largest eagle. Some are lucky and can return to the wild. Some are not so lucky and become education birds because they’ll never be able to successfully fend for themselves.  And some are downright unlucky and have to be euthanized because there is just nothing that can be done to save them.

I was at the center the morning the injured ravens were brought in.  You remember. Some idiot who mistook his manhood for his

On my way east for the holidays this year, I took a little detour to join my sister on a road trip that went from LaLa Land to the Land of Fruits and Nuts and back.  I am, of course, referring to a trip from Las Vegas to Southern California and back

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Did you know that there was a four-story store dedicated to M&M’s on the strip in Las Vegas?  Better yet, you can actually get maroon and teal M&M’s there.  You can’t miss it. It’s right next to the Coca-Cola store.  Who knew soda and candy could be

For reasons based mainly in guilt, I am actually going to travel east this holiday season.  After an absence of five years, my brother will be part of my mother’s holiday again and my sister and I decided that it would be nice if we were all together for Christmas Eve – something we haven’t achieved for more than 15 years.  Besides, it was easier to just accept the horror of holiday travel than to accept the quiet sighs from my mother that would end every conversation we’d have between now and Christmas if I wasn’t heading east.

This holiday

I don’t want to sound like I’m whining here, but what is it with all this rain in December?  Does Anchorage not have any idea at all about how to do winter?

I look out at the street in front of my house and instead of those lovely brown snow berms, I see four inches of ice so smooth you could hold Olympic tryouts on it.  The mud that I associate with spring break up is a Christmas phenomenon here.

At the risk of sounding like a displaced bush rat, let me just say that in the bush we know