“Breakup.” Affection for the season was lacking in the tone of her voice. Ah yes, breakup, that halcyon season including but not necessarily limited to March and April, when all of Alaska melts into a 586,412-square-mile pile of slush. The temperature reaches the double digits and for a miracle stays there, daylight increases by five minutes and forty-four seconds every twenty-four hours, and after a winter’s worth of five-hour days all you want to do is go outside and stay there for the rest of your natural life. But it’s too late for the snow machine and too early for the truck, and meltoff is swelling the rivers until flooding threatens banks, bars and all downstream communities—muskrat, beaver and man. The meat cache is almost empty and the salmon aren’t up the creek yet. All you can do is sit and watch your yard reappear, along with a winter’s worth of debris until now hidden by an artistic layer of snow, all of which used to be frozen so it didn’t smell.
