My father passed away in September. I am not a religious person but there have been angels everywhere since his death. Angels in the form of kind strangers, thoughtful friends, wise voices on the radio, joy filled memories and surprising little magical emerging details from his life. For example, the discovery I made while searching for his soc. number that on my birth certificate my father wrote “Woodsman” as his occupation. It was accurate, my parents were homesteading in the Brooks Range of Alaska when I was born, but somehow that word with all the fairytaleness is evokes, washes me with a sense of relief, admiration even wonder. “Woodsman” invites me inside my father’s 27 yr old self, how he saw himself and what his aspirations were. My father’s life was complicated and sometimes tragic but at his very center he was a man of the woods, a lover of wild spaces, a wild one himself and now he is the angel that greets me in the woods.