The crisp, hard beauty of winter melted away in last night’s rain. Summer’s soft, sweet smelling promise is far away. We live and walk in a gray purgatory without a taste of the richer seasons. Rain soaked driftwood logs lay scattered on the wetlands like corpses on a battlefield. One shows more life—lifting a slender limb up and over to frame the flooded Mendenhall River. “There,” it seems say, “That way summer comes with its salmon, seals, and whales.”