lessons in wishes, prayer, & rain

All my life I've heard the phrase "Be careful what you wish for". I wished for rain, and it appeared, accompanied by sparse bursts of thunder and a splattering of lightning.

 The first night, I took Pickle for a walk in it--these were not like the storms I knew in Pennsylvania. The thunder sounded far enough away that it could have been on the other side of the Sound. The lightning was silent. As we walked, I thought about the fear we always had walking in thunderstorms at home (before the rain). I used to fear that my belt buckle or watch would be my downfall, attracting lightning like the glow of eyes in the woods as our flashlights shown in. And yet we were always safe.

"That was some storm, huh?" my co-worker asked the next day. I stared at him to determine his level of seriousness.

 "I guess for Seattle," I shrugged. Two booms of thunder made for "some storm"? We still have power; the trees are all standing; and it rained for about 30 seconds.

 At first, I thought the storms were a sign of encouragement: I had prayed for this. Maybe this was my sign that things were going to work out--all of the work stress and worry. But then the clouds stuck around. The rain continued for a few days, and I remembered that in Seattle, grey is not a temporary word. I worried that it was here to stay already, that there would be no break of sun in a few days--were we locked in the six-month grey season already?

My worries were premature, as the hot summer days have already returned. But I love them more. The worry of winter reminded me that it's only bright for this short while--soon we won't even see the sun's shadow paint the sky. Maybe I'm still learning to the love rain, but I think I've realized this week that I'm learning to love the sun too. And learning to pray. And learning to accept the forecast.

a want for rain

It's funny how late at night, time goes simultaneously too slow and too fast. I looked at the clock at 9:58; I still have a few minutes to fall asleep before it feels a little hopeless that I won't get enough. A blink later and it's 10:07; it's all fucked. Just a few minutes later, and soon it will be midnight, & the whole next day will already be happening, & I'm not sleeping. 

I'm ready for rain. I can't stop thinking about it. The summers I've always known were full of thunderstorms and lightning and rain. Lots of rain. I know Seattle saves the rain for winter, and our summers are known for countless days of non-stop sun. The past few mornings, it's been cool & grey. I soak it in like a bucket full of sand: just add water, and you can build a castle in which to hideaway.

I get a lot of sleep in the winter: the long days apply hibernation mode, where I don't feel guilty about going to bed at 8:00. Somehow sleep comes easier when the dark stays longer; maybe my brain is just fooled by the early dark--oh, it's been dark for 5 hours? It's a false insomnia, negligent of the actual hour.

I don't mean to take the summer for granted. This summer just seems uneventful. Last year, we traversed about in my car. This year, we're homebodies, sticking to downtown and the dog park and going to dinner with friends. It's a nice, small life, but I can't help but wish I were in the mountains or the woods. I have no way to get there.

I think Pickle is a bit restless as well. She's been sniffing the same street corners for months now, but the scents are the every day. Even the sidewalks need the rain to bring fresh air through the town. Not to mention Pickle looks adorable in her raincoat.

It thundered twice last Saturday. A single deep grey cloud lingered in the East then disappeared to a clear and calm day interrupted by the roar of fighter planes spinning tricks in the air. The sun was nearly unbearable to sit in, and we all took to the shade. Thunder, come back.

 The summer before I moved here was the July of thunderstorms. I remember racing around the house to shut the windows as the rain poured in sideways and thunder shook the doorframes. Somehow that feeling--the slight jolt--can be felt all through; it's one of those things that reminds me that there's something bigger out there, that I'm small and helpless, and the world is so much greater.

 I miss letting the thunder lull me to sleep or letting it shake me awake at 3am only to rock me to a comfortable pattern of zzzs. Thunder makes me feel safe. I wish a storm were one of those things you could just drive to--like I could take a roadtrip to a thunderstorm and feel satisfied and whole. I used to pray for storms.

I find the rain romantic in a this-is-how-I-idealized-my-life-to-be sort of way. There was a slight drizzle when I awoke on Saturday. I thought I'd curl up in my reading chair in the living room and just listen to it, but I couldn't hear it there, only from my bed out the window. Not enough to patter off of I guess, so I sat and watched and listened. It didn't last long, but it was something. I'm sure in a few months, I'll be praying for the sun. Right now, rain is just refreshing.

life in the woods

We used to create pretend lives in the woods.

 

The first instances I remember are with my sister. Our first pretend home was the center of a circle of forsythia bushes. They were directly outside of our real home, but it was our own little hideaway. The round bushes seemed to create a wall with a tunnel to enter through. Once inside, it was like we were "big kids" in our own little home, closed in by powdery yellow with an open sky.

 

Our next was the giant pines a little farther up the yard. Pennsylvania really has some great pine trees. These were maybe forty or fifty feet tall with long, thick branches along the bottom, which were great for two purposes: 1) they created a skirt around the tree where we could hide (our new walls) 2) they were thick enough and low enough for us to begin the climb. We'd take turns, each climbing as high as we could (we were always climbing trees). Sometimes we'd lie down on the branches & pretend they were our beds, as if our bedrooms were just on different levels of our house.

 

(Now that I think about it, my sister always begged my dad for a treehouse. We sort of got it after years and years of piece by piece construction. We spent one night in it (still unfinished), and that was it. Never got done. But that's okay because I think we were better off for it because we had better times living in the trees because a treehouse isn't a wooden structure built among trees--it's just trees & an imagination.)

 

I have no idea what I thought as a four or five year old climbing those pine trees. The memories come in small snippets of questionable truth. Picturing me up in the pine feels like we were pirates, climbing the highest mast to lookout for intruders. I guess that's partially true--we never wanted to be found.

 

Yet a smidge farther up the yard, there was a small opening between clumps of trees that was its own cove, complete with…you guessed it--a brilliant old clawfoot tub. By brilliant, I may mean covered in dirt & algae and filled it the greenest water and the occasional turtle.

 

As I'm writing this, I’m realizing that is becoming more a list than a story of our many play-venture homes in the woods, barely touching the details of each. I'll settle for a few more before making my point.

 

There was this place we called the picnic area--a spacious opening between the trees where my family had set up picnic tables, a barbeque, & everything else necessary for a party. However, by the time we took to playing there, it had been long out of use and falling apart: a shadow of its former life.

 

At the far end of the clearing, a large beam sat propped on poles--a few railroad ties broken & balanced in their own little Stonehenge. We used to climb on the tie and use it as a balance beam, though I think its intended purpose was to be a serving table for food. Over a dip in the landscape, near the thickening woods, a small rotting hut sat full of pots & pans & random kitchen utensils. Sometimes we would go in there (usually on a dare) to sneak around for something for our pretend homes.

 

The picnic area was great for our play-pretend because everything we needed was already there. When the area was cleared away, we scraped our way deeper into the woods to build a new house. We’d graduated far from our old homes in the woods where we just played pretend that the trees were walls & rooms & living utensils--for this one, we took a level & made our best twelve-year-old attempts to create flat ground out of the hill. We then laid down plywood: floor complete.

 

Living up the road from a junk yard, we decided we should go rummage around for some other household items. We settled for one tire, which we rolled all the way up the hill around the bend, down & up another hill & back into the woods. We dug a hole and placed the tire over the hole: toilet.

 

Derek's parents had this little plastic garden wagon. We would fill it with utensils & snacks & attach it to Derek's wheelchair for him to tow it back into the woods for us--the beginnings of yet another woodland home.

 

So there we were: us & our play-pretend homes with our play-pretend lifestyles and our play-pretend futures.

 

I went camping last weekend. I snuck away a few times to just sit in the woods alone. There was a "primitive campsite" back into the woods--just a small open clearing, big enough for a tent. It wasn't occupied, so I'd go & sit on the small stone bench. Looking up: the break in the trees; looking around: the rustling, moving stillness of the forest; listening: silence, silence & birds in swooping whistles.

 

These are things I haven't experienced in a while. I've missed them. It all feels so familiar; I wished I could lie down in the grass & pretend that I was in one of our play homes in the woods. I actually did try, but it didn't take long to realize just how far removed my current life is from all of that--city, noise, pollution, solitude. I think that's a major downfall to being an adult: even when you try to imagine your life as different, it's all of the current intricacies that keep you bolted down in what is real.

 

I began to wonder if I would ever again have a home in the woods. I tried to imagine a career scenario that would allow it. I've often dreamt of living Annie Dillard's solitary writing life in a cabin in North Puget Sound. I don't know how to make that happen; now, after living so deep in the city, I’m not sure I could. Like how I wanted to live alone in the desert and am now beginning to realize how crazy of an idea that was for me in particular.

 

The idea of life in the woods again feels distant & impossible, like the prospect that one day I would have a husband & children. The truth is that I don't know what I want. I know what I've had and what I've loved, but I cannot say with certainty what I want. This is a strange place for me --yes, me, the girl with the evolving 5-year plans. Maybe it's just today.

 

I soaked in as much of the silent time with the trees as I could. Those moments are extremely rare these days, so I sopped it all up like our campsite did the rain, & I packed myself home to return to the present, the city.

Pickle, we're not in Kansas anymore.

October brings the official crisp of fall in strong gusts that steal away my rain hat and leave me grasping my jacket closed with one hand and holding on to Pickle’s leash with the other.

“We’re not in Kansas anymore,” I tell Pickle. It really does feel that way. I don’t know where I live anymore, but I’m ready to go home. Where is my Kansas?

Our community is replicating, which is great, but I don’t want to have to choose between two groups of people whom I love. We’ve had a lot of disagreement about it, particularly roommate-wise. I keep finding myself not even thinking about it because I’ve been thinking for a while now about migrating to a different community entirely.

I love my community. So much. But after some roommate conversations and thoughts of looking ahead, I am realizing that I am in an in-between migration stage. I want to move to Belltown—one step closer to downtown, and God-willing, one bus away from work.

I really have no idea how I would make it work. I would love to live alone, well, as alone as one can be with a dog, a turtle, and a fish. Unfortunately, pets don’t help pay the rent. I’ve got until March to figure it out. I’m trying not to worry about it now or even to pretend to make too many plans. They all change quickly anyways—like how Laura and I chatted about moving to Belltown together next year, which simply isn’t happening anymore.

But there is this community transition. It just seems like a good time to go, but until a decision is made and acted upon, I am a dry leaf hanging onto the branch and shaking in the wind. When I let go, where will I land?

oneyearlater

It would rain today.

My roommate now has a boyfriend, so our Friday night movies are officially over as marked by today—rain. No good to do much outside as the first of fall’s gloom settles in: a teaser of what’s to come. I’m starting to understand Seattle’s seasons.

I tried to make plans but failed. Most of them in my head, making up reasons that people couldn’t come over or me just not wanting to go out. So I didn’t. Pickle and I stayed in.

“Standing on the fringes of life offers a unique perspective.”

Pickle & I, well, I watched The Perks of Being a Wallflower. There is a small list of reasons this movie ended up in my DVD player:

1. the book has been a favorite since middle school

2. the sound track is perfect

3. Emma Watson

4. it was on sale at Target

5.  it makes Pittsburgh real—it drives me right through the Fort Pitt tunnel: sense of home

Tomorrow, my parents will pack a big ol’ truck and come to Seattle. They are bringing the rest of my life out. The material things, anyways—the bookshelf my dad made many moons ago; the turtle house my dad and I made two years ago; my pet tortoise who lives in the turtle house, of course; a kiln by which I have yet to make new things; the books that have comforted me like a wool blanket—heavy and warm. They’re bringing all of it out here just for me. So many miles.

I can’t help but think that this is it—the one-year mark. Monday will make it official—August 5^th.  Remember how a year ago, I was climbing in the window of my wretched first place here? I'm only on my third apartment...My “plan” was to come here, get a degree, and leave to sunnier skies. Well, I got here, and that’s about as much of that list as I’ve accomplished. I have no intention of leaving anything soon.

Funny how determined we can be once our minds are made up. Like how it had to be that I would stay home with Derek. Like how I had to graduate early and move far away. Like how that far away had to be Seattle, not Arizona.

Lately, when I look at the Space Needle at night, wholly illuminated such that it glows more than the others buildings, I can only think it must be fake. It cannot really be there; I cannot really be here. How did I get here? How has a whole year passed already? I guess it’s really only like eleven months actually in Seattle if you count all of my road trips and escapes; nearly a whole month on the road, out of the city.

And here I am preparing to sell my car. No more open road. This country girl is ready for a new kind of adventure: full immersion in the city. We already live in Uptown, walking distance to all we need; bus to everything we don’t; bike to everything in-between. When I bought my car three years ago, I told myself that I would drive it until it died—it’s a ’99 Subaru and had 51,000 miles on it at the time. 40-some thousand miles later, it’s still running strong, but I just don’t need it.

That car carried me back and forth to Waynesburg for a whole semester. It lost a mirror parked out on the street there. It got its door jammed in the day of Derek’s funeral. It drifted through the winding hills of Kentucky and the unseen horizon of Texas and the brilliant New Mexican stars and back again. Then through the National Parks and Monuments on the drive West to Seattle. Then through snow storms and desert in the same trip to Phoenix and back.

Damn.

In the movie, they’re listening to “Heroes” by David Bowie and driving through the Fort Pitt tunnel, and they come out to the Pittsburgh skyline and the bridges and the signs. “Monroeville>>>>>” I think of the times I took that exit, the brilliance of the city that I didn’t see too often.

One morning in particular comes to mind. I dropped my parents off at the airport. It was two weeks before Derek died. I had just gotten back from Italy a week or two before. The world was new to me. Derek was going to get better. I was home again. We were going have a great semester together. This was how the world was always supposed to be.

It was four in the morning. The sky was pink with the strange light of dawn not yet peaked coming over Appalachia. The city was quiet, still. The freeway was a glorious open-air speed path before me, unlike the tight curves that led to the stuffy hospital every day.

My iPod was on shuffle. The windows were down. “On the Bus Mall” by the Decemberists came on, a song I had somehow never noticed.

“And in that moment, I swear we were infinite.”

I will learn to love the rain. Part Two.

Picture it. Me--the person who scrunches out her shoulders, shrinking her head down like a turtle in its shell when the rain starts--walking in pouring rain at 9:15am on the way to work. I just got off the bus and am walking three or four blocks to my building. The rain is gathering in the sidewalk dips, and as it was when I was a child, the puddles are so tempting. When I see bodies of water, I just want to be in it, which I guess be a bit contradictory to my sentiments towards the rain.

I will learn to love the rain.

I'm a sucker for temptation. I look at my feet and decide to test out my rainboots. As I walk, I am always humming or whistling or scatting or singing. On this day, I decided to make up my own song, and for some reason, it came out in a British accents. With each step I reached my legs far enough to splash in small puddles. I walked carelessly and probably looked drunk. Each step splooshed and sent water upwards.

"Raiiin boots! Raiiiin boots! Splash-ing in pud-dles in my raiiin boots!!" I chimed in-time with my steps and an unbreakable smile on my face. I like watching the water's reaction to my heavy feet against its surface.




Of course, each day ends, and as I left that same day, I saw the much larger puddles that had gathered throughout the day. I reasoned: I no longer needed to look presentable. I took a running start and jumped up, propelling my body forward like a kangaroo.

SKLOOUSH!!

The water seemed to move in slow motion. It felt heavy in the air and reached my legs in thick splatters. I was soaked to my knees while other streams sporadically sprayed up my thighs. I fell forward in landing and laughing and kept walking.

As I arrived at a street-crossing, the light was red. I searched my iPod to fit my mood and put on "No Rain" by Blind Melon. I loudly started singing along and swaying. Then I caught motion on the sidewalk in my peripheral. I looked over and to my surprise, my co-worker, Marc, was standing next to me. "OH HEY!" I said too loudly as I pulled a speaker bud out of my ear. We then carried out a normal conversation, and I didn't even act sheepish about my outburst of song (Julia Child--NEVER APOLOGIZE, blog post #2?). This was our first actual conversation since I started work, so we were really only covering the basics: where are you from, where are you now, etc.

We walked briskly, and soon, the rain started again. We both ignored it and kept talking and kept walking. Oh yeah, I'm a Seattleite.




Tonight, I called my dad on the two-mile walk to my bus home. It's nice to have some company during the walk, and I had missed a call from him earlier in the week.

"I like to walk home to the Pike St. bus stop on nice evenings," I told him. "It's not even raining! Can you believe it?"

I spoke too soon. As I was passing Safeco Field, the rain started. I thought it would just be light and ignorable like it was when Marc & I walked right through it. Soon, waves of rain swayed in the wind. Oh boy.

I dug through my bookbag for my umbrella. The wind blew it open. OH BOY.

I was still on the phone with Dad, "I will learn to LOVE the rain!" I repeated. This mantra never gets old. He laughed. "You know you want to come join me in the rain," I said, laughing too.

Not as confident in rain AND wind, I shrunk my body against itself, huddled under my practically useless umbrella. I slipped my bookbag around to my front, though it was already soaked. The wind pushed the rain against me, urging me forward and soaking my entire backside.

I thought back to my trek across the Ballard bridge. I'm pretty sure I was ready to cry then, but here I was now LAUGHING.




Of course, I'm not there yet. I still have a long ways to go. I've been fortunate enough to only have puddles to maneuver on my runs thus far, and my waterproof sneakers seem to be handling that alright, but I'm still nervous for running in actual rain. I know it will be soon. Mostly, I just never know what to do with my eyes--they want to shut against the sharp, cold pellets, but I need to see! Haven't figured that one out yet.

Regardless, I have lived in Seattle for approximately fourteen weeks, and I'm not a total hermit. That's good, right?

I will learn to love the rain.

Like my want for health, I have to constantly be on myself about it. To be fit, you can't just try to lose weight and then quit when it happens. You have to keep up the hard work--constantly eat well and move much. Now, to make this rainy season part of my lifestyle, I have to constantly face the rain and appreciate the wet.

I will learn to love the rain.

Random Encounters. Part Two.

You may be wondering why this is Part Two, but Part One is forthcoming. Be patient.

I rushed to my morning bus stop, as always, though I'm early. I dashed under the small pavilion that housed the waiting bench. It was raining. A man, maybe in his sixties, sat on the bench. He picked up his newspaper from beside him, but I always choose to stand.

I cuddled up to my hot tea and let out the day's first sigh. Ahhh. Checkpoint number one.

"Today November Nin-teen, yes?" the man turned to me. He had a thick Eastern European accent. German?

Caught off-guard, I looked at the calendar page written on the inside of my upper eyelids, "I think so." I nodded, feeling more certain, "Yes, it is."

He let it sink in, lightly bobbing his head and shoulders together with his brow straight across in thought. He looked up again.

"Rain really going down."

"Yeah." I'm not really a conversationalist in the mornings, especially after my other encounter, which I have yet to share.

"Wow," he smiled, remembering past rain. Then, slowly, "Always this time of year... ev-er-ee-body... pick out Christmas trees! Even in rain, pick out Christmas trees! Rain like this. Even rain like this."

He did not look at me as he spoke. He stared into the rain, looking through it to another street in his memory. The bus breaks broke his reverie as it reached the stop sign on the corner and began towards us.

"Ah, the bus... is here, " like a summoning charm. It stopped before us, and he motioned for me get on ahead of him.

Reminder

The rain feels refreshing like everyday is clean and pure and newer than the dry days of leftover dirt hanging around on the sidewalks.

Remind me of this feeling in the spring months when I am soggy and shriveled and feeling un-revivable.