Homeward Bound

Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home.  Wise words.  As an expat, it's hard to tell where home is when someone asks.  Home is where you grew up.  Home is where your family is.  Home is that city where you have roots because your forever people are there.  Home is where the property you own is.  Home is where you are.  Then as my friend Steve said, you can have several spiritual homes.  So when someone asks where home is, I often don't know if I should say Saskatchewan, Edmonton, Bermuda, or Alaska.  They are all home, for all of those reasons.  Today I am talking about this home...the place I lay my head when exhausted.  My sanctuary.  The place my cats live.  That home is in Alaska.  And as homes go, Alaska is anything but humble. 

 

 

There is something about this spot in the Eagle River Nature Center that always draws my eye.  The blue grey hue of the mountains which look just a little unreal under clear skies, and stark and ancient under grey skies.

 

The thick yellow matted grass that lies atop what I know to be marshes all around the area.  These narrow shallow streams that I was shocked to learn are the salmon breeding grounds I had heard so much about...they seem too small, too slow, and too remote to be the starting and ending place of the legendary salmon (interesting fact -- salmon travel from these freshwater streams to the ocean and adapt to salt water.  They live in the open ocean for about 2 years before swimming back to the freshwater streams...their bodies readapt to freshwater, and by following scent and chemical signals in the water, they return to the exact, specific stream they were each born in...presuming nothing eats them along the way of course).

The little marsh below may look cold and a little static in this photo.  But somewhere just out of sight in that range there is at least a moose, maybe a bear calling this their humble home for the day.

Nothing seems "soft."  I confess I watched a little "Project Runway," in the past, and never really got what Heidi Klum was always going on about with fabrics being "hard" or "soft" in the esoteric sense.  Well, I am starting to get it now.  When I look at these pictures, they are all pretty to me...but they are all "hard".  The trees have a little less foliage, more needles than leaves.  There is more definition on the wood.  As peaceful as each scene is...each is more "hard" than "soft."

 

 

This one may be a little hard and a little soft at the same time.  Probably sounds better when Heidi Klum says it.

 





In this last one, I just loved the reflection of the log, and the deep shades of blue in the scene.  I loved Bermuda and all it's warm azure blues.  Alaska is navy blue, occasionally icy blue.  It reminds me of a color my Grandma loved most in her paint sets...cobalt blue.  She would have liked my Alaska blues.