Newsfeed rampant —
with the most absurd presidential election season in American history,
irreversible climate change, and deadly racism.
The feeling of dread over our collective future:
inescapable.
September 22, 2016, just after 6 a.m.
In bed, reveling in the last REM dreams of what should have been the night before.
“Katie. The sky is red.”
My husband, Karl, standing across our room in boxer shorts,
folding back the edge of the shade and looking out the deck.
I uncharacteristically (for this time of day) get out of bed.
Sailor’s warning in my head.
Now it’s me peeking out.
The sky is red, purple, peach, deep hot pink.
Slide open the glass door and stride down the deck,
a mad woman in a drooping velour baby blue bathrobe.
From the end of the deck, Mt. Hawthorne: silhouette on a multi-hued pastel sky.
Giddy with delight, I make two more passes up and down the deck.
On the second pass, there’s our son, sitting in his father’s chair looking out the window. Scruffy beard. Laughing at me.
“The equinox is happening,” he mouths.
“Right now.”
Light comes up on a Mark Kelley calendar morning.
Sandy Beach on fire.
We have to get down there for a run.
Fumble and fluster my way out the door,
throwing on fleece and running shoes.
Three minutes later Karl, Ernie the black lab and I spill out of the car.
Colors in the sky lightening up now as the mist rises,
and the sun makes it’s way up and over our granite mountain peak,
touched with a hint of glacier.
The air’s warm with an ever so light breeze.
An uncommon energy propels us along the sand.
Karl and Ernie a stretch ahead of me, mesmerized by the colors of the sky.
Take a quick look behind me.
Not one, but two sheets of rainbow streaming down to earth.
I yell up the news to Karl.
He points to his right and the rest of the rainbow, arcing over Mt. Jumbo.
We stride down the sand, morning lightness ahead; double rainbow at our backs.
“Happy Equinox,” I shout with glee to dog walkers going the opposite direction.
Equinox energy embracing humanity.
The universe speaking at this pivotal moment of transition, amidst racial divide, homophobia, shrinking glaciers, misogyny and political ridiculousness.
Maybe we’re going to be okay,
under parallel rainbows.
Time to get back home, to work.
Extraordinary orange becomes golden light,
Embracing mountain tops, one by one:
Mt. Juneau, Mt. Jumbo, Random Douglas Island promontory.
Each summit a diamond of hope for humanity.
By the time we’re home, the light is gone, forever missed by late risers.
The grey moves in. And the rain starts to fall.
• Katie Bausler is a former broadcast journalist, the current Community Relations Director for Bartlett Regional Hospital and a volunteer DJ on KRNN, 102.7 FM public radio in Juneau. She holds an MA in English from Middlebury College and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Alaska Anchorage. She writes occasional columns for the Sunday We Alaskans section in Alaska Dispatch and has had several pieces published in the University of Alaska Southeast literary journal, Tidal Echoes. Katie and her husband Karl are devoted residents of the island kingdom of Douglas.
• To submit to Writers’ Weir, email your poetry, fiction or creative nonfiction to managing editor Mary Catharine Martin at maryc.martin@capweek.com.
