Fall in Southeast Alaska means rain. Forget all thoughts of bright fall leaves and crisp evening football games. Let go of your fantasies of moonlit hayrides, and get used to being wet. Here’s a top 10 list of how to cope with endless rain:
#10: Stay in bed. When the sound of the rain outside is louder than your alarm clock inside, there doesn’t seem to be any point in getting up in the morning. Embrace the work ethic of our forefathers, who labored from sunup to sundown. As the days get shorter, you’ll gain a few extra hours to lounge in bed.
#9: Hibernate. Take the “stay in bed” advice to its logical conclusion. Lock the doors, pull down the shades and refuse to come out until spring. You can spend the next six months or so on a variety of useful pursuits, like reading, watching Wheel of Fortune on TV, taking in all the Marx Brothers movies in order or doing Sudoku until the numbers 1 through 9 are burned into your retinas.
#8: Try something new. Many people take up a new hobby in their hibernation phase, opting for quilting or fly tying or collecting box tops to benefit the local schools. Statistically, more quilts are produced between the months of September and December than all the rest of the months combined. Then if all else fails, you can play video games all day. If you’re part of the under-20 set, you can subsist quite well on Minecraft alone.
#7: Redecorate. Nothing like hibernation to reveal the inadequacies of our interior spaces. You can go low key with a simple rearrangement of the living room furniture, or you can go all out with an interior paint job. Around here it’s not the leaves but the dining rooms that change color in the early days of fall!
#6: Mentally spend your PFD. Those days between the announcement of the annual amount and the actual disbursement of the cash are the sweetest days of all. Before receiving the money you can enjoy all the fantasies of what you could buy, the places you could go, the home improvement projects you could finance with that windfall of unearned cash. Then the car breaks down or the credit card bill arrives on PFD Day, and your long anticipated cash barely grazes your bank account before it’s gone, leaving you to savor your fantasies for yet another year.
#5: Shop. Go online or go downtown; hit the mall or visit the consignment shop. There are endless opportunities to spend all the money you just got in your PFD, assuming that there’s anything left, of course.
#4: Follow your favorite sports team. Whether you’re a football or a baseball person, fall is the best time for you. Baseball is revving up for the playoffs and the World Series, and football kicks off with the promise of touchdowns and tackles galore. Skip the tailgate party and huddle around your TV to watch someone else play in the rain.
#3: Lay bets on when the rain will turn to snow. Sure, everybody loves to get in on the Nenana Ice Classic, and bet on when the ice will break up on the Tanana River. But for us in Southeast, there’s a more important milestone to put money on. The start of the snow means the end of the rain, and we’re all for it. Bring on the white stuff!
#2: Leave. I’m not talking about red and yellow fall leaves, but the kind of leaves that allow you to get out of town in the fall. It’s time for snowbirds to board up their houses along with the tourist stores downtown and head for the sun in Arizona or Florida. For those of us with only one abode, it’s time to visit Grandma down south for a week, or at least take a triangle trip to Whitehorse where the sun always shines. Anything to get out of town!
And the #1 way to cope with the rain: Go outside and play. Mom was right all along; you don’t know enough to come in out of the rain.
• Peggy McKee Barnhill is a wife, mother and aspiring author who lives in Juneau. She likes to look at the bright side of life.
