Chasing Lakes by Katey Walter Anthony

Author:Katey Walter Anthony
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-03-29T00:00:00+00:00

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MY PLANE LANDED in Minneapolis from Frankfurt, Germany, on June 16, four days before the wedding. For several weeks, I’d been working with one of my students at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology. We were opening our eight-foot-long cores of Northern Seward Peninsula lake sediment inside an oxygen-free glove box. Inside the anaerobic box we scooped sections of cores into 300-milliliter glass bottles. After capping the bottles, my student would remain longer in Germany to monitor how much methane the sediment layers would produce. Halfway across the world, Peter and his parents were planting crops, painting barns and fences, and preparing the farm for a big wedding.

Rural Minnesotans don’t hire other people to do their yard work. They do it themselves. The flower beds were immaculate. The vegetable garden was garnished with daisies and cosmos. The cedar walls and decks of the large, central farmhouse were newly stained. Fresh yellow paint coated support beams on the grain bins, and the trim on all the barns and sheds was a clean, bright white. Two large tents and a stage had been erected on the lawn in front of the house. Tables beneath the tents were set for two hundred. I arrived in time to help cut flower stems in the basement for bouquets of pink and white roses.

On June 20, 2009, Peter and I were married in his family’s nineteenth-century Norwegian Lutheran country church two miles across the fields from the farm. A tractor-drawn hay wagon carried the bride and groom, along with a multitude of children, my three sisters, and our closest friends, from the church back to the farm. The wedding and reception that followed were joyful. I knew twenty-two of the two hundred guests. I was thankful to have these friends and family—who had come from as far away as Germany, Mexico, Nevada, and Alaska—see at least for once in their lives the place I would come to call home.

When Peter’s best man got on the stage with his guitar and began a song he’d written about the meaning of my name, the words struck a guilty chord in my heart. “Katey, pure as the snow.” Most people at the wedding did not know the irony. Tears trickled down my cheeks and fell on the white satin wedding dress I’d borrowed from my best girlfriend in Fairbanks. I was not pure. Almost exactly a year before the wedding, my anxiety about my past had come to a head. My relationship with Peter had become more serious by that point, and the friend, whose wedding dress I would eventually wear at my own wedding, implored me to tell him about my past before he proposed marriage.

That moment, ten months before my wedding day, had been a painful crash between my old life and my hopeful new one. For months I dreaded confessing to Peter unvirtuous acts I’d committed as a young woman, during the years when I’d turned my back on God and during the years I had climbed the slippery slope back to my faith.

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