The Hindcast: Anchorage’s Past Week in Weather

When the wind stopped, white, crystalline dew coated rooftops and grass. I cut one last bouquet from the planter boxes and it was so beautiful I wanted to eat it. I wanted to have that beauty—pinks, reds, orange, and green--become a part of me. My body can’t stop its planning and preparations, but for what, I’m not sure. Before my job and chores, I jog and squat and bench and deadlift. What does it mean even, to “work out.” What, exactly, is it that is “working out?” At least doing so gives me license to consume more, having expended something. It is harder to pinpoint what is produced by this effort: it’s not immunity. It does pass the time constructively, in some sense. Muscles have bulged where before they laid low. Endorphins come and go, and I feel better. Time, though, has a strange new abundance that seems to require passing. I have no shortage of things to do; yet days stretch out like they did when I was a child, before I learned that activity is supposed to have meaning and hours are scarce. My high school friend sends me a picture of the new skateboard she got for her forty-second birthday and my ears remember the old sounds of a board flipping, of wood hitting pavement, of wheels spinning on their ball bearings, of countless hours just existing, three-dimensionally, through time.

Jessica Cherry, PhD is a scientist, writer, and commercial airplane pilot living in Anchorage and Fairbanks.