Well, it's been a quiet week in Cicely, Alaska.

The fireweed has gone to cotton, which is the only calendar anybody up here actually trusts. The blossoms start at the bottom of the stalk in July and work their way up all summer, and when they reach the top and blow out white, you have got about six weeks before the snow. Nobody voted on this. It is simply the arrangement, and the fireweed has never once been wrong, which is more than can be said for the ferry schedule, the Almanac, or anybody's brother-in-law down in Palmer.

And then Monday came, and it was Labor Day, and Cicely observed it thoroughly, by working.

Darlene closed the post office, because Labor Day is a federal holiday and Darlene is a federal employee and procedure is procedure, and she will tell you so at length. She went home at eight in…

News from Cicely

Flags

Well, it's been a quiet week in Cicely, Alaska, where the light has been doing what late May tells it to do, which is more or less whatever it wants. By four in the morning it is already pale gold along the ridge, and by nine at night it is still that same gold, a little lower, a little softer, and you would swear it had not moved at all if you weren't watching carefully, which most of us aren't, because we have things to attend to.

Darlene was up before the light on Monday, which is saying something this time of year. She had the flags out by five, every one of them, along the main road and down the side streets and one at the corner by Ruth-Ann's that she's been planting in the same hole for nineteen years. She does not talk much…

Strangers Come and Go

Mud season brings a green car with Idaho plates, a young man with a duffel bag, and the question Cicely never quite asks out loud.

By DJ VVolf · KBHR 570

Well, it's been a quiet week in Cicely, Alaska. The road was the road again on Tuesday, more or less, which is to say the snow had given up its claim to it and the mud had taken over the dispute. That's a different kind of disagreement entirely. Breakup does what it does. The state will come through with the grader in another two weeks, and until then everyone drives the road in the way you drive a road in May, which is the way you walk through a barn in your good shoes. Carefully. With apologies.

It was on Tuesday, in the middle of all that, that a small green car with Idaho plates…

Well, it's been a quiet week in Cicely, Alaska, where the light has been coming in at that late-April angle that hits the spruce trees just below the crown and sets them glowing like they know something.

Johnny Tumbleweed has been playing records.

This is not, in itself, unusual. Johnny plays records every afternoon from two to six, which is what he does and what the town depends on him to do. But this week he went to a crate he doesn't get to often, a crate that lives behind the couch and underneath a stack of old Alaska Sportsman magazines he found in the shed and hasn't read, and he pulled out a run of records that nobody in Cicely had heard in a good long while. Or maybe had never heard. Or maybe had heard once, a long time ago, and had stopped hearing in the way you…