I Saw Her Standing There (The Beatles)

It's June in Alaska, which is fairly predictable every year in the fact that the weather is absolutely unpredictable. Then again, the same may be said for every other month and season way up North. I've been blessed with adventures galore with my friends including last month's trip to Talkeetna. My three closest friends and I loaded ourselves into one car on a whim one afternoon and made the 2+ hour drive to Talkeetna. We spent the afternoon wandering the small town there, and ate at the brewery. It was a great place, filled with eccentric atmosphere from the outdoorsy cabin theme complete with wooden tables to the interesting choices of art in the bathrooms. My friends and I crowded into a table, chatting about the usual nonsense that true friends always do and ordering various appetizers and meals. The food was actually really good, as promised by our friend, chef Dan. It was the kind of burger I could imagine my dad really sinking his teeth into. The kind that you can be assured they made their own hamburger patties for, with that smokey taste you can't help but appreciate. The kind of burger that has real cheddar cheese and a toasted bun, and if anyone dared place a dehydrated onion on it they would probably receive the death sentence.

 We wandered across the old bridge onto the beach and chattered as we braced ourselves against the cold breeze and walked along the massive logs washed up on the beach. In the end we ended up wandering the local graveyard, filled with a collection of new, old, respectable and eccentric gravemarkers. It's a humbling thing to look on the face of a yard filled with remembrances of vibrant living beings who once graced the world and brought love, joy, pain, happiness, sadness, and purpose to others in the world. There were graves for old people, young people, soldiers, teenagers that passed in driving accidents. I don't think I was as humbled as my friends at the prospect of the graveyard. We wandered from stone to stone, and I was reasonably subdued in respect of the dead. It's curious how the prospect of loss affect even those not directly associated with it.