Many of the “Indians” — that’s what they call themselves and what we call them too — in our small Alaskan town live in a separate community called Saxman.
It is unseemly to blow your nose into a tablecloth. If you share a / bed with another man, keep still. If you pass a person pissing, do /not greet him.
Out past the bridge, past the edge of town where the old houses give way to the stretch of firs that continues for a few miles before dissolving into shrubland, there is a little church
Mama was born in the year of the Dog. In the Chinese Zodiac, dogs are known to be loyal and stubborn, of which she was both, but mostly I thought of her as brave.