Leni reached into a box and pulled out the mason jar full of ashes. For a lovely moment the world blurred and Mama came to her, smiled her bright smile and gave her a hip bump and said, Dance, baby girl.

When Leni looked again, the boats were splashes of color against the blue-green world.

She opened the jar, poured the contents slowly into the water. “I love you, Mama,” Leni said, feeling loss settle deep, as much a part of her now as love. They’d been more than best friends; they’d been allies. Mama had called Leni the great love of her life and Leni thought maybe that was always true for parents and their children. She remembered something Mama had said to her once. Love doesn’t fade or die, baby girl. She’d been talking about Matthew and sadness, but it was equally true for mothers and their children.

This love she felt for her mother and her son and Matthew and the people around her was a durable thing, as vast as this landscape, as immutable as the sea. Stronger than time itself.

She leaned over and dropped some bright pink fireweed on a gently rolling wave and watched it float toward the shore. She knew that from now on, she would feel her mother’s touch in the breeze, hear her voice on the sound of the rising tide. Sometimes, berry-picking or making bread, or even the smell of coffee would make her cry. For the rest of her life, she would look up into the vast Alaskan sky and say, “Hey, Mama,” and remember.

“I will always love you,” she whispered to the wind. “Always.”

MY ALASKA

July 4, 2009

by Lenora Allbright Walker

If you had told me when I was a kid that someday a newspaper would come to me to talk about Alaska on the fiftieth anniversary of its statehood, I would have laughed. Who would have thought my photographs would mean so much to so many? Or that I would take a picture of the Valdez oil spill that would change my life and make it onto the cover of a magazine?

Really, my husband is the one you should speak to. He’s overcome every challenge this state has to offer and is still standing. He’s like one of those trees that grow on a sheer granite cliff. In the wind and snow and icy cold, they should fall, but they don’t. Stubbornly, they remain. Thrive.

I am just an ordinary Alaskan wife and mother who prides herself primarily on the children she has raised and the life she has managed, somehow, to wrest from this harsh landscape. But like all women’s stories, mine has more to it than sometimes appears on the surface.