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By Root 287 0

horizon until you reach the Arctic Circle at 66° latitude, which runs across the state about two-thirds of the way to its northern coast. There, the sun doesn’t rise at all on winter solstice. If you took a dogsled north from that dotted line on the map, you’d lose the sun for days, then weeks, then months. In Alaska and other northern regions, the wide arc the sun makes across the northern sky all summer long is pulled taut, until the sun merely scrapes low along the southern horizon. The moon usurps the sun’s summer path and dominates the winter sky. The winter constellations I’d learned the year before returned. Orion led the parade across winter’s night skies; W-shaped Cassiopeia, her husband Cepheus, the Great Square, and that small question mark–shaped group of seven stars called the Pleiades followed suit. Here, it was easy to see how the sky rotates around the North Star, which sits almost directly above the Earth’s axis: Over the course of one night, the Big Dipper dumped itself out. A clear moonless night revealed a sky infinitely perforated by stars and in the morning, Venus glowed so brightly it cast its own milky light on the surface of the bay.

But the dark sky had once again ratcheted around us. The darkness drove us home earlier on winter afternoons, and kept us in later in the mornings. Before moving to Alaska, I had been warned about the long, dark winters. John and I had looked up the statistics for Homer: The shortest day of the year—December 21, winter solstice—offered about six hours of light. The sun rose at 10:05 A.M. and set at 4:04 P.M. The darkness had seemed mysterious and exciting. But we hadn’t known that the quality of light also changed drastically with the seasons. Because the Northern Hemisphere leans away from the sun during the winter months, in midwinter the sun rises barely a hand’s width above the mountain range to the south. Shadows are long even at midday. In winter, sunlight passes through a band of light-scattering atmosphere thicker than at any other time of year, which makes the light gentle and hazy. Over the radio, experts urged listeners to go outside during the few lighted hours in order to get at least twenty minutes of sunlight into our retinas each day, which they said would help ward off depression from seasonal affective disorder. Shops around town sold lights that simulated the sun, some of which steadily brightened, like a plug-in dawn.

Although neither John nor I seemed to be suffering from lack of light, winter forced us to look at ourselves and at each other, and it wasn’t just because the view out our windows disappeared for so much of the day. For more hours than not, the panes framed reflections of ourselves. John pulled out his book on the stars, which suggested what it called a new way of seeing the constellations—new pictures to link stars, new ways to connect the dots. Given the same dozen points, you could draw so many different things. I began to think of all of the lives I could live: up north at the edge of the sea or someplace else; with or without John; as a teacher, student, or as someone else entirely. The points in my life could be reshuffled to create different, overlapping lives, in the same way stars are shared between constellations: The end of the Dipper’s handle becomes the nose of Ursus Major. Andromeda’s head is also one of the corners of the Great Square.

I couldn’t help it. I began to slip into these other lives, as you might for a moment stop seeing the ladle and see only the bear. I imagined curling up on the couch with the friendly plow guy when he came into the house to use the phone when John was gone. The plow guy had gotten his truck stuck in the ditch along the driveway. Why hadn’t I told him that there was a ditch there, now hidden under the snow? Didn’t I know that was my job? My stupidity made me cringe, but the plow guy, in work pants wet up to the thigh from wading into the snow, was gentle and unfazed. I considered taking off to learn tango in Argentina, where it was summer. I would throw on a flimsy dress and slide into