Mom made a wonderful discovery last week. Cleaning out her files, she found a fat packet of carbon copies of letters she'd written to family in the "Lower 48" during the 60s and 70s, the first two decades of our family's life in Alaska. Yesterday afternoon, I spent a happy couple of hours on her back patio, reading many of the letters. They brought back many of my own memories: my cheerful rivalry with R during the cross-country ski racing seasons when we competed on opposing high school teams; Dad's annual fall moose hunts; various backpacking and winter ski trips; our semi-annual trips Outside to visit family; the Matanuska Valley cabin where we often weekended; the loss of our beloved family dog, and so on.

The letters also offer glimpses into Mom's own life, concerns, and interests at that time. She worked at various editing jobs, ferried children to countless before- and after-school activities, kept us all clean, fed, and clothed, and ran the household single-handed during the long stretches while Dad was away doing fieldwork. During the same period, she also earned a teaching certificate and pursued graduate-level study in English literature. She especially enjoyed a course in math. How did she fit it all in? And she recorded some of her own memories: worrying about Dad, off hunting moose with the weather turning bad; wondering how the heck she was ever going to master the new technology of computerized document publication; watching E manning the goalpost during a hockey game as his attention drifted away from the game, bewitched by a beautiful, rising winter moon.

The constraints on Mom's time were so tight and her leisure time so infrequent that a letter typically took her a few days to complete. Most often, she snatched a few minutes in the late afternoon to write a few paragraphs, before we needed to be fed yet again and she needed to make yet another supper. How many hundreds of gallons of her trademark moose stew must she have cooked during those two decades, I wonder?

Returning home from her house later that afternoon, I stopped for a walk in the Nisqually Wildlife Refuge. The refuge is busy this time of year, with great blue herons stalking the marshes, frogs croaking from the ponds, cedar waxwings and warblers flitting through the trees, swallows swooping and soaring everywhere, and troops of young ducks and geese following their mothers around the ponds.

One sight might look more than a bit familiar to Mom. The refuge office building is plastered with many cliff swallow nests, all close enough to the walkways below them that it's easy to see the four or five nestlings inside each one. Those nestlings are constantly, ravenously hungry, and they vociferously let their parents know it. Each time the adult bird returns to the nest, the nestlings beg and cry to be fed, with mouths open wider than one might believe possible. For the parent swallows, life right now must seem like endless rounds of hunting, feeding, then hunting for more. But of course, those nestlings will fledge before so very long, just as my brothers and I did long ago.