I carried two cups of tea into the dining room and placed one on the table in front of my daughter Tammie. Glancing up at me, she questioned, “Did you put sweetener in mine?”

Sitting down across from her, I admitted, “Your tea might be sweeter than you like.”

Taking a sip, my daughter raised her eyebrows and chuckled, “It is pretty sweet!”

I offered, “Would you like me to get you a fresh cup?”

“No, it’ll be fine.” Tammie assured me. “I want you to stay at the table with me so we can discuss where we will go for our vacation this year.”

Cupping my cold hands around the warm mug of tea, I confidently suggested, “This is the year we should go to Alaska.”

With a broad smile, Tammie commented, “We’ve talked about going to visit Alaska for the last dozen years. Somehow, it just never happened. Why do you suppose that was?”

Nodding, I admitted, “The idea of going there has always appealed to me, but we never could agree on what we wanted to see or do while in Alaska. We talked about going salmon fishing on the ocean, but I felt really reluctant about it. This year I’ve finally realized that fishing would be fun to do if Arnie were still with us, but not for us to do alone. A fishing trip like that was something he would have absolutely loved, but that doesn’t mean we have to do it! We also talked about Alaska’s gold rush history and how much fun it would be to try panning for gold in a stream. We never investigated finding a guide for that.”

             Tammie added more reasons why our plans to visit Alaska other years just never worked out, “We never could come to an agreement about which cities to visit, where to stay, nor how long to stay.”

My reluctance to plan a vacation to our nation’s 49^th state may have been because my last visit to Alaska in 1976 nearly ended my marriage. I went there four years after Arnie and I lost our two-month-old baby, Christy. Finally, I had begun to work on the state of my mental health. One summer afternoon my twenty-year-old sister-in-law visited us. She was soon leaving Wisconsin because her husband had moved to Alaska a month or two earlier. Now that he had rented a house near Anchorage, he asked her to come join him.

Although I seldom do things spontaneously, that afternoon, I excitedly told Arnie’s sister, “I’m going to fly to Alaska with you!” I never discussed doing this with my husband. The possibility of asking Arnie to join us never entered my mind. In retrospect, it seems like I was wearing mental blinders that kept me from seeing how Arnie might feel about what I was doing. In thinking back to that time, I don’t even know if Arnie’s sister wanted me to go with her!

While in Alaska in 1976, I took a tram to the top of Mount Alyeska, took a bus tour to visit a glacier, ate lunch at a skyscraper restaurant that slowly turned 360 degrees and saw damage that could still be seen from the 9.2 1964 Good Friday earthquake. While there I learned that when Anchorage residents see the first dusting of snow on top of Mount McKinley in the fall, which is now known as Mount Denali, they call that snow ‘termination dust’, because it terminates their summer.                       

A distant cousin who lived in Anchorage needed help doing a rushed final harvest of her garden because ‘termination dust’ had just appeared the night before. We helped her pick huge red raspberries, giant heads of cabbage, and long, fat orange carrots.

When I returned to Wisconsin, Arnie was so angry with me, he told me he didn’t know if he loved me anymore. It took us nearly a year to dig ourselves out of that hole and forgive each other.

Tammie jolted me out of the reverie I was in regarding my 1976 experiences, by suddenly announcing, “I’ve found the perfect thing for us! We like being pampered and yet want to visit several cities without having to move from one hotel to the next. Neither of us want to walk long distances but would like to see glaciers and pan for gold. The perfect solution for us is to take an Alaskan cruise!”

Holding up her phone so I could see its screen, Tammie explained, “Here’s an Inside Passage cruise we can take. The ship will stop at Juneau, the capital city of Alaska, Sitka, Ketchikan and Vancouver, BC. During the stops, passengers go ashore for tours, fishing trips, visit wildlife centers and enjoy trolley and tram rides. We would see a glacier and probably whales. And Mom, one of the shore excursions offers a chance to pan for gold, followed by an outdoor salmon bake!”

Looking at the pictures of an Alaskan cruise on my daughter’s phone, I enthusiastically and spontaneously ordered, “Sign us up! I need to experience a new Alaskan adventure!”