melting home

I love ending and beginning a year in Alaska.  It's such a great way to reflect and ground myself in a place that intensely safe, refreshing, and unequivocally home.  I will be sad whenever my parents sell that house and move on.  So much of my life was spent in that home.  Cracking up into the wee hours with my best friend, looking out the backdoor window in the middle of the night when I had insomnia, running around the backyard, jumping in the (ice cold) lake, ice skating, birthday parties, movie nights, crying over stupid boys, doing hours and hours of homework, putting on fancy gowns for high school dances, coming home to a driveway full of emergency vehicles and watching them put my brother in an ambulance– barely alive, running through sprinklers, making a "bobsled" route down the backyard hill after being inspired by the winter olympics, playing dogsled and dragging brothers around the yard in a sled, moose, bears, eagles, beavers, secretly decorating a huge evergreen with christmas lights and surprising Mom... it's hard to count all the memories that have been made in that house since we moved in in 1997.  Those don't even scratch the surface.  It's strange to think that I was just a little kid when we moved there, and now I'm an adult, with a home of my own.  We've barely begun making memories in our new house.  It's so comforting to be in a place that is teeming with memories.  I feel like I'm soaking in a warm bath of familiarity and love.  The best spa treatment.

dress/courtesy of modcloth :: shoes/courtesy of blowfish :: belt/thrifted necklace/gift from moorea seal :: jacket/courtesy of asianicandy
I miss snowy outfit photos!  Snow is just so beautiful and pristine.  And despite the chill, I still enjoy taking outfit photos in frigid wintery scenes the most!  Maybe we'll have another "snowpocalypse" here in Tacoma like we did last year.  I think Dan & I must've brought some Tacoma with us to Anchorage because the temperatures were in the mid 30's the whole time we were there, melting all the snow off the roads.  It did make it a bit less painful to do outfit photos though.  No rubbing red, frozen fingers together this year. 
I got to refill on dog-time, spending plenty of time playing with Simon, and Little Bit was more social than usual with a house full of people.  She's definitely getting old.  She's blind in one eye now, and her hearing is going as well, but she's still a spry ol' broad and holds her own against 2 year old Simon (who's almost twice her size!).  It's strange to think that just 2 years ago we were galavanting around the country together, sitting on the edge of the Grand Canyon and running around the beach on Tybee Island, dipping our paws in the Atlantic.  She hung out with me for these photos, and poked her little, blurry head into the photo below.