adaptation

 And so we all settled into life in our new cabin. Bill was working at the university again, but now he had to drive 25 minutes to get there, instead of just heading 3 miles down the hill. I was at home, trying to adjust to non-academic life—a life I’d been a part of one way or another for almost all of my adult life up to that point (I’d started at a community college when I was 25 and our daughter was starting first grade). I was somewhat lost for a while, but I did have a lot of time to think!

The critters had their own adjustments to make. Our sled dog, Mikiruaq, (who let it be known early on that she was actually a bed dog, not a sled dog), was nervous. She was not one for change and she wasn’t keen on this one. The cabin was great—I loved the way things were set up and organized to make use of the small space. There was a living room, small kitchen, and bedroom downstairs and an almost ladder-like set of stairs. Upstairs was an open space, with a bed on one side and open space on the other, where we set up our computers, back when big desktops were the thing. The dogs could not navigate the stairs, which was an issue for Miki. She did not like for us to be out of her sight. She had to adjust, though, and she did. She and her brother liked to sleep on opposite ends of the futon couch. 

It was not long before I noticed that she knew when Bill was cominghome from work. She would suddenly sit up, turn around, set her chin on the windowsill and look out the window until she saw his truck turning into the yard. By paying attention to how much time elapsed between her sitting up and Bill’s arrival (about 10 minutes), I knew that she somehow knew when he was getting off the Richardson Highway. It didn’t matter whether he stopped for groceries, gas, or water on the way home and was a little later than usual or left a little earlier—she knew.

The cats also had a change in personality. Bentley became a madman, racing around the cabin with his bent leg, getting into stuff, and generally being crazy—a big change from how he behaved in the previous house! One day, I came home to find poppy seeds all over the floor. He’d gotten into shelved cart where I had them and ripped open the package. Another time, I found that he’d gotten into my basket of crochet thread and chewed/clawed some of it to shreds. We got lucky on the night he decided to eat some yarn. I saw a piece dangling from his mouth, so I grabbed it and started pulling. I pulled, pulled, and pulled some more. It just kept coming. He was gagging. But we eventually reached the end. I started calling him Pest Elvis, but I still loved the little guy.

J Frost E had his routine. He loved the duster that was supposed to be Bentley’s beloved toy. The latter had no use for it when he started living with us, but J really took to it. He had a system for the cabin. He played with it off and on throughout the day. But at night, things got more intense. He would start playing with it upstairs, then at 10 o’clock every single night, we would hear the thunk, thunk, thunk of J carrying his duster down the stairs to get wild with it there. You could set your watch by it. Who knows why 10 was the magic hour. He knew.

During winter nights, we could watch the northern lights from bed, which was cool, if we didn’t feel like getting dressed and going outside in the middle of the night. The cabin had a septic tank, but no running water, so when we had a holiday weekend where the temperature got down to -50F, we didn’t really have to worry about freezing pipes. Bill did have to go out and start the truck each day so it could run for a while, but by the Monday, even with that and keeping it plugged in, it wouldn’t start. He called the auto club people around noon and they said it would be 3 before they could get there because they were backed up.  We weren’t planning to go anywhere, so that was fine. Time passed. Three o’clock came and went. Hours went by. The evening passed. It warmed up to almost 0(F) so we went outside in T-shirts and started shovelling some snow. The guy showed up at midnight. It took a few tries and the guy almost gave up, but they got the battery going and we left the truck running for a while to warm up. 

Winter turned into spring and we continued our discussions about how we wanted to proceed. We were soon to come to some conclusions.