Faith has grown into a young woman and her beautiful cat has left this world

At Metro Cafe, I pulled out of the drive through and stepped inside for a change. I hadn't been in there but a minute or so when this young woman pulled up to the window. She smiled and said, "Bill Hess!" I had no idea who she was, but there was something familiar about her. "You photographed my cat," she said. I photograph a lot of cats, all over. I could not place her. Finally, I quit trying to picture the person sitting in front of me and tried instead to picture a young girl, I've been doing this for a long time. Then I remembered. About 10 years ago I did photograph her and her beautiful cat at her childhood home in Barrow. The cat has since passed on. Faith now lives in Wasilla and in August married the son of some friends of mine from Barrow. Her husband's mother contacted me before the wedding and badly wanted me to come and take pictures, but I had a job I was committed to in Nuiqsut. Offhand, I forget the name of the cat, but it occupies some space in my as of yet unpublished and still growing book about Alaska cats. Someday, you can read the name of cat in there and learn about its life and about how much Faith loved it. You will see it was a very beautiful cat, born with an internal defect and it lived much longer than it was expected to. 

 Barista Kristina - always pleasant. She has never skied before, but today she told me she now has skis and will soon be skiing.

The Squarespace nightmare continues unabated but I decided I wanted to post this picture anyway and did it completely the old fashioned, tedious, time-consuming, Squarespace 5 way, which is inefficient but still works.