This photo feels iconic. The truck is parked in the middle of nowhere, somewhere completely nondescript, , and we are looking forward, into the adventure.

See that camper?! Six people lived three months at a time in that camper. No bathroom, no freezer or refrigerator (icebox only), no oven. It was heavenly.

On the door is a white-tail deer and the words “El Cazador” (“the hunter” in Spanish).

Did someone say “squirrel?” I immediately dropped what I had planned to do (revise my dystopian novel) and went looking for the instructions and plastic trays that came with the scanner. Of course it wasn’t that simple, but after watching several YouTube videos, I eventually figured it out.

And oh, my dears!! I struck gold.

I have never seen this photo before, but this represents the best of my childhood.

No, not the #10 cans! The peanut butter was OK, but the strawberry jam from those things is nasty! To this day, I cannot eat any strawberry jam other than freezer jam (which tastes like real strawberries and not like that horrible processed #10 can jam).

The best of my childhood was in that camper. Dad built the camper himself, just big enough to fill the bed of his 1962 three-quarter-ton Chevy pickup. Our family of six lived in it for the entire summer most years (Dad taught school, and we left town the day school ended most years).

Mom and Dad slept on the lower bunk, right behind me in this pic. The upper bunk pulled out about halfway, and I shared it with my three sisters. At first, we were short enough to sleep parallel to the truck bed, then three of us slept crosswise, with one sister at our feet (usually complaining that we were kicking her). Eventually our oldest sister switched to sleeping in the cab of the truck.

See plates on the truck? I zoomed in to check the year: 1969. I was eight years old. We were headed to Alaska to spend the summer on Brushkana Creek, where Dad would work with a local guide (and hopefully bag a moose before we left).

There were few stores nearby, so Mom had to bring most of our groceries from home. We filled the camper with canned goods: lots of peanut butter, as you can see! The space under the bed had room for a layer of cans, plus there was covered storage below that would fit another layer.

Mom had a series of dinners she could make on a three-burner stove (no oven in the camper). The only two I remember are campfire stew (a pound of hamburger mixed with a family-size can of Campbell’s vegetable stew-–surprisingly good!) and delicious chicken and dumplings made from canned chicken: one whole, uncut chicken in a can.

Us kids loved those summers, not the least because we were allowed to drink pop all summer, rather than tea or water, to save dirtying glasses. But also because we were allowed to roam the wilderness without supervision from dawn to dusk (and dusk is late in Alaska!).

Parents probably couldn’t do that now without getting into trouble with CPS. In my memory, we ran free as young as five. A few years ago I told Mom that’s how I remembered it, expecting her to correct me. She was very quiet for a long moment, then said, “It was a different time.”

But none of us got hurt (at least, not too badly), and it was a great way to grow up. You can see how happy we were, packing the camper for our adventure.

Yep. That’s one very happy girl.

It might sound kinda silly in words. It’s a bet we all place (yes, literally) with Mother Nature about when the ice in the Tanana River will break up.

Whoever comes closest wins the pot. The rest goes to charity.

It’s not about winning money though, at least not for me. It’s about bragging rights.

It’s also about hope. Faith that the unending winter will, in fact, actually end. Eventually.

Last year was (of course) our first Spring in Alaska, and I spent more hours than I’d want to admit watching the Nenana Ice Classic Fanpage on Facebook. The Fanpage was run by a delightful woman named Rebecca who live-streamed a daily play-by-play at the river’s edge. It was crazy FUN!!

Sadly Rebecca moved Outside, and boy, did I miss her ebullient description of the ice breaking up! But the Nenana Ice Classic—an interior Alaska tradition since 1917—was still a highlight of my Spring.

Mars and I bought our tickets in March and tried to guess when the magic moment would happen that the iron tripod in the Tanana River would tip over and stop the clock.

This year it happened April 30 at 12:50 p.m. Alaska Standard Time (like all things one-hundred-years-plus, the Ice Classic doesn’t do daylight standard time).

Our guess? April 30 at 3:11 p.m.

Guys, we missed it by TWO HOURS AND 21 MINUTES!!!

Not bad for a couple of greenhorns from the Lower 48.

I do realize this is my privilege speaking. We weren’t in danger of losing our income, and I was free to sequester at home for the year (I’m in four different high risk groups, and I kinda wanted to survive). And although we were four adults hunkered together in a home, it’s a big enough house for each of us to have our private space.

So, yeah. I’m privileged. I did what I could to try to help limit the damage for others, but it’s never enough. Especially in Fairbanks. We have a large and visible population of homeless people, and my resources are not enough to fix the problem. But I did try to help as I could.

My family fell into a pattern of using our public spaces at different times. Our two adult children stayed up all night and slept in the day time, and Mars and I kept more traditional hours. We all ate dinner together most nights, which was very nice.

But the consistent thread of the year—the thing that made 2020 one of my best years—came from a surprising place.

I love (love love LOVE!!!—please insert silly puffy glitter unicorn hearts here) the independent singer-songwriter Jonatha Brooke. Her music speaks to me. In fact, soon after I found her, Mars and I both spent an entire summer listening to nothing but Jonatha Brooke.

At some point, I followed her Facebook Page, so when she started doing weekly concerts from her kitchen via Facebook Live, I was sooo there! I missed the first Kitchen Covid Concert, maybe the first two, but I watched all the others live for more than a year (with one exception toward the end when I had to take one of my children to the doctor and had to watch the recording later).

It didn’t feel like a life-changing choice at first. In fact, not for several months.

I spent many weeks rediscovering how much I love doing jigsaw puzzles. Unfortunately, I’d finish the thousand-piece puzzles in a day or two, so I moved to two thousand and then three thousand pieces. That three-thousand-piece one took a couple of weeks. And it was enormous! Bigger than the table I was using, so I had to commandeer the dining table for a while.

Jigsaw puzzles are fun, but it didn’t feel productive. What I wanted to do was write, write fiction, but I was scared. The past ten years or so have been extremely stressful and painful for me, and I stopped writing at some point. To start up again in my 59th year seemed ridiculously optimistic.

Then Jonatha announced a songwriting workshop. A couple of years ago, I took a music theory class in Port Angeles from the inimitable David P. Jones. We had to compose a few pieces of original music for the class, and it whetted my appetite. I don’t see myself becoming a composer or singer-songwriter, but it was definitely fun dabbling in a completely different creative medium.

So I took Jonatha’s class. It was mind-bending. Storytelling in a completely new way. I started taking notes for songs and practicing the guitar. SO. MUCH. FUN!

In August, though, I happened to find notes for a novel idea I’d written four or five years ago. It started as a late night, alcohol-fueled Facebook conversation with a friend whose been my muse more than once. I don’t remember how the conversation started, but we were tossing what-ifs back and forth, and at some point, one of us said, “Wow! This would make a great novel!” So I wrote up the notes, tucked them into a digital folder, and promptly forgot about them.

Fast forward to August 2020: I skimmed the notes and felt the hair on the back of my neck prickle. The story was a dystopian novel based on the increasing polarization between political factions in the US, and my notes were downright prescient, right down to the pandemic.

That’s what I started writing again. I finished the first draft of The Truthspeakers in January. I set it aside to cure and started outlining a memoir. By April 1, when I picked the novel up again, I had the memoir outlined and the first draft about seventy-five percent written.

I have developed some strong work skills, and I find myself getting up every day, eager to start working. I’m excited about both of my current projects and believe each has the potential to make a big splash in the publishing world.

And none of this would have happened if Jonatha Brooke hadn’t shared her heart, her creativity, and her inspiration. She shone a light on my path during a very dark year, and looking back, all I can see is the brightness.

Thank you, Jonatha.

Love, Katrina

I recently unpacked a box of photographs and found my mother’s diaries, including the one for 1973, the year my family went along on Dad’s travel camp and I met the boy in the back of the van.

Mom rarely kept up with the entries over the summer, when she was even busier than normal. So this diary has entries about getting ready for the camp—mending and airing sleeping bags, washing camp dishes, sorting supplies—but the dates we were actually traveling are all blank.

It was the end of July before she wrote again. And here is the second entry that month, written July 31:

Finished ironing this a.m. at 2:00. (Two boys from the camp) came over & we looked at the slides (the boy in the back of the van) took on the trip. Katrina wasn’t very friendly & thought (he) was mean but it was her own fault.

Aaaannnd there it is. It was my own fault.

Oh, I know she meant that it was my own fault he was mean since I wasn’t friendly.

But I’m equally aware that sexual assault was always the girl’s fault in my parents’ mind. Don’t believe me? Click on the link above and read the comment my sister wrote.

Mom writing this in her diary—because I wasn’t exactly thrilled to find my molester in my home—is perfectly apropos and ironic.

It was my own damn fault.

A friend of mine retweeted this meme November 18 with the comment, “I do not have a formal diagnosis. And yet, I just scored a blackout on this BINGO card.”

Just for hoots, I did the card myself. And…OMG> I scored a blackout also. It never occurred to me I might have ADHD.

Then another friend, a woman I have an enormous respect for both as a person and as a writer…oh, heck, who am I kidding? I totally have a crush on her. Anyway, this writer shared that she was diagnosed in her late 40s. “Lifechanging,” she said.

Still, it’s just a meme, right? I didn’t take it seriously.

But it seemed like ADHD articles kept popping up (I know, algorithms). When I clicked on a blog post about Rejection Sensitive Disphoria, I found myself reading about one of my most characteristic traits. And I knew I needed to at least look into the possibility.

The next time I saw my counselor, I asked if she thought it was worth testing for. I had only seen her a handful of times, so I expected her to say she had no idea.

Instead, she said, “You know, the first time we met, I made a note to ask if you have ADHD.”

She recommended I look at DIVA (Diagnostic Interview for ADHD in Adults). It was eye-opening. By my uneducated, inexperienced attempt at scoring it, there was no question in my mind. I have ADHD.

Last week, she and I spent an hour going through the last of the questions. Though I had already looked at the DIVA in depth, and though I had little doubt as to the outcome, it was excruciating.

See, to get an ADHD diagnosis, the telltale characteristics have to have exhibited before the age of twelve. When a provider is doing these interviews with an adult, they prefer to have a relative present, or someone who knew the patient as a child. But my father is dead, and my mother has memory loss. I asked my sisters some specific questions that I wasn’t sure about, but none of them said they remembered me as a child. 

So we spent the hour digging up my painful experiences, detailing the myriad of characteristics my mother hated in me. By the end of the session, I was that broken little girl again, convinced that she wasn’t worth loving and that her mother begrudged the very air she breathed. It took two days of conscious mindfulness and meditation before I felt like myself again.

In my parents’ legalistic, Fundamentalist view, my behavior was sinful. It was obviously my choice, and proof that I was not a “good girl”. I do not believe the way they do, and years ago (with the help of a string of great therapists), I realized their inability to accept me as I am was their problem, not mine. But despite all that, at a deep, core level, I still believe the message: I am inherently, fatally flawed and without hope of salvation or redemption.

One of the few secrets I posted to Postsecret was about that feeling. It was on the now-defunct Postsecret app, and it said, “I’m a Christian, but my Fundamentalist parents wouldn’t go to a Heaven that would let me in.”

My diagnosis is technically ADHD with Inattentive Presentation. It’s possible I’m also hyperactive, but  I don’t remember enough about my childhood to be certain. Regardless, I have ADHD. 

What a relief! I’m not sinful or horrible. I just have ADHD. Yes, I am a dreamer and scatter-brained, but I am not lazy. I just have ADHD.

And personally? I think hyper focus is my superpower. I can get an incredible lot done in very little time because of it. Case in point: I wrote a 120,000-word futuristic novel between November 1 and January 24.

The real shock was a co-mordibity of “severe anxiety”. 

Oh, I know I have anxiety. It’s kinda hard not to realize that. But I have been under extreme stress for most of the last ten years. All five of the most stressful life events happened within a short span of years (no, I didn’t get divorced, but I’ll admit it felt touch-and-go for a while).

But since moving to Fairbanks almost a year and a half ago, everything has been so much better. I love it here. I’m sleeping well and eating right. I’m meditating. I was exercising regularly until the gyms closed. I’m reading voraciously. And I’m writing again. I’m happy!

So the shock isn’t that I have anxiety. The shock is thinking that if my current anxiety level is severe…how the heck did I survive the last ten years?!

Mars and I have been having a discussion about sneezing. Specifically about whether or not one sneezes with one’s mouth open.

My nose has been a little stuffy the last week or so. When I realized I was about to sneeze, I thought, “Oh, good! It’ll clean my nose out.”

But it didn’t. Most of the force went out through my open mouth. So I asked Mars, who is famous for very loud and effective sneezes, whether he sneezes with his mouth open. He didn’t know.

Yesterday, he informed me that he sneezes with his mouth open. He had sneezed, so he made a point of noticing.

I wondered if perhaps sneezing would work better if one kept one’s mouth open, and I made a mental note to try to keep my mouth closed next time I had to sneeze.

Today I sneezed, and I remembered to keep my mouth closed.

Pro tip: DON’T CLOSE YOUR MOUTH WHEN YOU SNEEZE!

First, it hurts. A lot.

Second, though I sneezed into a napkin, the force was sufficient to spray my whole face. I had to wipe my face and re-apply my foundation. Then I had to clean my glasses.

You’re welcome. All in the name of science.

I’ve been working on my nanonovel: The Truthspeakers. I’m at 85,000 words, and I want to finish it this week because I have a workshop starting in a week.

In the past, when I wanted to get a lot done fast, I’d check myself into a hotel with room service and not leave my room for a week. I’d work until I got sleepy, then sleep until I woke up. Rinse and repeat. I’d lose track of any semblance of a “normal” schedule and pretty much live in my fictional world.

It worked very well for me because my subconscious would work furiously while I was asleep, and I’d get up and go straight to the computer to capture what the boys in the basement dictated. My subconscious is a much better storyteller than I will ever be.

I haven’t done one of those hotel retreats for years. First my life was insane, and then we couldn’t afford it. And now, COVID. But it occurred to me that since I have no outside commitments (again, COVID), maybe I could do a DIY retreat, especially since Mars has offered to be my room service (he makes a mean dry martini!).

I started Wednesday, and I’ve written about fifteen thousand words so far. I figure I have about fifteen more to finish the first draft.

Yesterday, magic happened. I was writing a very complex scene. Mostly conversation, but it’s the scene where my protagonist is most deeply conflicted. I’d written five or six little bits of dialogue, just grabbing them as they came. But I hadn’t yet planned the scene.

One of the ways to structure a scene is to have the POV character come into the scene wanting something specific. She tries to get what she wants but fails. So she tries a different tack but fails again. She tries once more and fails or succeeds (it doesn’t matter). Either way something happens that kicks off a new goal for the next scene.

The moment I started planning the scene structure, I realized my POV character already had a clear goal because of something that happened in the previous scene: she wants to get medical treatment for someone she cares about. Hurrah! That’s exactly how it’s supposed to work.

Then I realized my snippets of dialogue fell very neatly into three different ways she might try to meet her goal. First she asks nicely, but the person in control refuses. Next, she threatens, but that doesn’t work either. When he calls her on it, she argues that she was offering a bargain rather than a threat.

At that point in the planning, the scene took an unexpected twist. The other character in the scene offered a bargain of his own: a Sophie’s-Choice-type bargain. Great stuff, right?!

I started drafting the scene, and it went very smoothly even though I was stitching in these bits of pre-written conversation. I got to the part where the other character offers my protagonist a devil’s deal…and the character just took over (he was a little angry).

He not only forced her to make the impossible choice I had planned—a choice where not making a decision is even worse—he used her own words to turn the screw. Whoa! Where did that come from?!

But then he increased the stakes by an order of magnitude. He made an argument that was absolutely convincing for the outcome he wanted. A statement so True that I realized and my character realized it changed everything. Including the end of the book.

It was information I didn’t have. Once he stated it out loud, it was obvious, but it hadn’t occurred to me.

My character knew something I did not know, and he acted on it.

*Magic*

This year started with an impeachment and ended with an election the outgoing president has refused to accept.

And of course, COVID-19, now synonymous with 2020.

So many people are hurting. Sick and dying. Behind on rent/mortgage and fearing homelessness. Out of a job and praying for relief that hasn’t come. It’s hard to find a silver lining in this mess.

But I’m a big believer that painful experiences teach our souls, and I do think (hope?) we have learned a few things as a result of this dumpster fire of a year.

First, I think we have seen how it can devastate a society when conflicting groups cannot agree on basic truth. When each group believes they know the truth, and the other side is wrong or brainwashed or whatever. (More on this in a moment.)

Second, Mars and I spent much of this year studying racism. My white privilege allowed to believe for years that societal racism largely ended with desegregation, but the problem was front and center for most of 2020. And that’s a good thing. We cannot make our society truly egalitarian without first facing the inequities.

Third, we learned this year that much of what we do just doesn’t matter that much. In March, our ordinary lives crash landed and burst into flames, but the sun still came up every morning (at least for most of us; my heart breaks for the three-hundred-thousand-plus who died from COVID or were disabled, not to mention their grieving families). Many of the activities with which we filled our hours turned out to be non-essential, at best.

For me personally, it hasn’t been a bad year (and yes, I know that’s my privilege speaking, and I have done what I could all year to help people who aren’t so lucky). I have so much to be grateful for.

For instance, I LOVE Fairbanks. I am so lucky to live here. I should have moved here twenty years ago. I love the snow and cold. I love the constant change in light (even when the change is moving toward three and a half hours of sunlight a day). I love that Fairbanks is a small town, but with my better shopping alternatives than most small towns. I love the people here. Etc.

I’ve also found I really like the much slower pace of the COVID lifestyle (though an occasional restaurant would be nice). My inner hermit exults in this social distancing. No pressure to look a certain way or live up to someone else’s standards. No overstimulation. Much less running around. We bought a new car when we moved here in September 2019, and we’ve only put five thousand miles on it!

I started reading again this year. I mean, really reading. I’ve been a big reader my whole life, but the last few years were so stressful that I haven’t been able to concentrate long enough to read a book. But now I’m sucking them down again. So grateful.

I’m also writing again. I’m about halfway through a memoir about my painful relationship with my larger-than-life father (who died a year ago December 9).

But I have set it aside for the moment to write a new novel. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how a society is affected when two polarized groups cannot agree on factual information and each side believes the other side is the one with “alternative facts.” Eventually my thoughts became a story. And it’s going very well. I’m about two-thirds of the way through the first draft.

So. Here we are. On the cusp of a New Year (or slightly over it). I think we can pretty much all agree that 2020 can just piss off! But personally, I’m taking a few things from it with me into the New Year.

In 2021, I want to watch the sun rise and set. Often. I want to meditate more and spend more time in silence. Conversely, I also want to make music more. I want to spend more time at home and less time running frantically about (though I do want to see my grandsons!). I want to read books, lots of them. And I want to finish my current works in progress, and start shopping them to agents and publishers.

First, I need to explain (since I apparently never blogged about it, though I have a distinct memory of doing so) that my father died a year ago December 9. Ours was neither an easy relationship nor a close one, but that doesn’t keep the relationship from having a huge impact on me. He was my father, after all.

At my mother’s request, I wrote the obituary. Sadly, the persons in charge of purse strings (not me) decided it wasn’t worth the cost of publishing in the newspaper, so it was never posted except on the funeral home’s site. Someday, when I have a computer with memory to spare, I’ll post an updated version here with lots of pictures.

December 9 of this year, I was very much aware of the date. And yesterday I got a Christmas card from my mother with a collage of a few great pictures of her and my father. On the back, she’d attached a sticky that said, “Last year card that didn’t get sent.” It was odd and painful to see his face again.

No doubt that’s what prompted my dream.

I dreamt I was at Dad’s funeral. He didn’t actually have one — our family is too painfully divided to gather en masse without burning down the house. His body was cremated and someday, maybe, some of us will gather to scatter his ashes. Or maybe they’ll be divided in half, and two different groups will gather at two different times to scatter his ashes in two different places. Or maybe it’s already been done. I’m not sure I’d know.

But in my dream, I was attending his funeral. The kind of funeral I would have expected as a child for him to have. Lots of music. A speaker. All of it basically calling sinners like me to the altar to repent or burn forever in hell.

Those are not the kind of services I attend these days. My church is very liberal and far from fundamentalism. Nonetheless, I had a bad experience a few years ago.

Not long after we moved back to the States (Autumn 2016), we went for the first time to our denomination’s local church. We fully expected to join that congregation.

The preacher spoke that morning on forgiveness. He gave himself as an example of how to be Christlike (never a good idea, IMO). He told how he and his brother had differed over politics, and it threatened to destroy their relationship. But he eventually broke the ice and “forgave” his brother (for having a different opinion? not sure).

It hit me hard. Less than a year before that (December 2015), my father had thrown me out of their house because I dared gather the family to discuss how to support the parents so they could remain in their own home despite the facts that both were slipping into dementia, Dad was falling repeatedly and couldn’t get up unassisted, and Mom had leukemia.

I had gone to visit them earlier that summer (2015), thinking I’d stay for a month and deep clean their house. But they needed so much more help than I ever dreamed. Ultimately I spent six months there, taking care of them. Sorting out their meds, getting blood sugar under control, getting Dad’s cataracts fixed, etc. So I KNEW how badly they needed help.

Unfortunately a faction of the family apparently decided I was just trying to get money from Dad, or something, and convinced him he couldn’t trust me. So he threw me out in an ugly and public way. I left assuming I’d never see him again. And at the time I visited that church, I hadn’t and still didn’t expect to ever see him again.

Of course it’s much more complicated than that one event. I disappointed him the moment I was born with a split instead of a stick (my first midwife’s language), and I was never allowed to forget it. He was an absent father for the most part, and when it wasn’t absent, he was often cruel.

And he sent two clear, crazy-making messages:

• “You are a Stonoff, so you are expected to do great things and change the world.”
• “You are a female, so you can’t ever do anything important. You need to find an important man to marry, so he can do great things and change the world.”

Yeah. I am broken as a result of being his daughter. That’s a lot to forgive. Plus, what does forgiveness even look like? To me, it doesn’t mean I have to continue allowing him to mistreat me.

That day in late 2016, sitting in the local church listening to that pastor preach about forgiveness, it was clear that the pastor’s view of forgiveness aligns with that of my fundamentalist, misogynistic, possibly abusive relatives who say forgiveness means turning the other cheek and letting your batterer punch you on the left side of the face after he’s broken the right side of your jaw.

Many years ago, I realized that Dad’s cruelty came from his own brokenness, and I long ago forgave him for it. Him throwing me out of his house was a bit too raw at that point though. It had been less than a year, and it still hurt like hell.

Who am I kidding? It’s been five years now, he’s been dead for a year, and it still hurts like hell.

I have a glass face, and that pastor saw that his sermon was getting to me. No doubt he thought I was feeling convicted over guilt (though actually I was feeling grief from the loss of my father). What those kinds of men do when they think they perceive guilt is to press on the sore spot until the person breaks. Apparently that’s supposed to bring salvation. Everybody shout amen.

The pastor used one of those little mics you pin to your clothing, and he wandered the dais as he spoke. When he was saw that I was upset, he left the dais and came to stand directly in front of me.

You have to appreciate, we were sitting in the second row (that’s always Girly Girl’s choice). So the pastor was literally close enough I could have grabbed his shirt front. Or his mic. And I totally should have.

For the rest of the service, he remained glued in his spot, smack in front of my chair, directing every word of the rest of his sermon right at my face, never looking away. It was humiliating. I felt branded by a big red S for “sinner”, though this man had never met me and knew zero about my life.

The moment the service ended, we ducked out a side door to avoid having to shake the bastard’s hand, and of course we never went back. A year or so later, I learned the pastor had retired and left, but there was no way I was going to join a congregation that experienced my humiliation.

Branded with a big red S. That’s exactly how I felt in my dream. That every singer at Dad’s funeral, the person giving the sermon, and the person giving the eulogy were all standing less than a foot in front of my face, staring eye to eye, and announcing to everyone in the room that *I* am a worthless person without hope for salvation.

My beloved father-in-law died sixteen years ago. And several times he’s come to visit me in my dreams. Always very sweetly. The last time, he told me he was busy but very proud of me, hugged me, and left. These have never felt like dreams. They feel like visits, and I am infinitely grateful for them.

I have often wondered, especially in the year since Dad died, whether my father would also come to visit me in my dreams. I doubted it — he rarely thought about me at all, as far as I know, much less made any effort on my behalf. Nor was I at all sure what he might say, much less that I wanted to hear it. But I wondered.

All I can say now is that if my dream last night was a visit from my father, NO THANK YOU! You just go right back to wherever you ended up and leave me the hell alone.