Unconnected Dots

I once heard that people can fabricate memories from when they were very young based on stories. I’m fairly sure my first memory is one of these, but I love it just the same. If this is the case, I’ve been careful with the details I have fabricated.

Wrapped in a pink and blue crocheted baby blanket the world was hazy and white. I was in my mother’s arms with my brother, 16 months my senior, beside her. It was cold and loud. We were on an airplane flying from Oregon to Alaska. We would live in Alaska for a couple of years at the most, but I would return 18 years later on my own. From later experiences I know the flight would have taken about 4 hours. When we landed my father was not there. He was hunting with my uncle. My mother, stranded at the Anchorage airport with an infant and a toddler, called my aunt Roberta and waited over an hour for her to come.

My mother and I have often discussed what happened after she arrived in Alaska. I have her bitter stories mixed with a few visual memories from the time. My father had left Oregon quite some time before to go stay with his brother who was already living in Alaska. He would be gone for days drinking and hunting and chasing women. My mother, not ready to let go of her husband when she had two young children and no real means to make money, followed him after giving up on him coming back or sending for her.

He didn’t change his activities much once she arrived. Left alone with nothing but canned salmon my father had caught and without a car or money she struggled to raise my brother and I. We lived in a run-down trailer near my aunt and uncle. In the spring when the snow would thaw and freeze the trailer would freeze and become uninhabitable.

In the dark with my cousins we played a game where colored plastic pegs could be stuck in holes in a lightbox to make pictures.

My mother, desperate to feed us and having given up on getting money from my father, found work as a receptionist for an insurance company.

My dark, handsome father bent over a boat upside down on two sawhorses sands the wood and applies red paint. We are by a cabin at a lake surrounded by spruce trees. My mother packed a picnic basket with food and I wondered if I was in a storybook.

I don’t know how the decision is reached to move away from Alaska, but we did. I am told we drove instead of flying. My next memory is of living in a trailer park in Smith River, OR, but who knows what happened or if we lived anywhere else in between.