Seattle Spring

Light broke out across my face, hitting my eyes before I opened them. Is it summer in that big, blue house in Pennsylvania where I spent years leaving the blinds open to be awakened by the sun? No. It is winter in Seattle, yet for a long stretch of sunlight, it almost felt like home.

When I move to a new place, the first thing that I always do is make my bed. So, with boxes sprawled across our apartment floor, I ripped the plastic wrapping off my mattress and began methodically adding sheet, duvet, pillowpillowpillowpillow. I stepped back and decided that even if I accomplished nothing else, my bed was ready, and sleep would save me from the intimidation of emptying the boxes that I spent the week filling only to move two miles down the road.

With much work, by the time sleep came around, the boxes were flattened and tucked in the top of my closet. As I lied down, I began to reflect on the day.

“I can’t believe how much we got done today. I built a fucking bookshelf!” I said, looking around the apartment.

“It’s amazing that IKEA can make you feel that accomplished,” Laura lightly chuckled. I looked at the 

bookshelf again.

“Well, I did. I built a bookshelf!”

“No, you built a fucking bookshelf.”

It really doesn’t take much to make a place feel nearly complete. All week I have been worrying—what will it be like when we actually get there? Will we ever really move in? Now I look around, a full day in, and wonder if I actually did live in a dark basement with yellow walls and “Please and thank you” notes posted all over.

This morning’s light renewed my hope. A hope that Seattle really might be the right place for me. A hope that I would be okay in the city. A hope that there is purpose behind all of this, that I’m not here by mistake. –all that from a blue canvas sky and open blinds.

As when I was growing up, the light kept me awake. I could not go back to sleep once my pupils had shrunk to pencil-points and my spirit had leaped into the physical recognition of the starting day. I tried to read, but the blue shown through the window with such strength that it screamed, “Greet me; I will not last,” so I threw on yesterday’s clothes and my winter coat to meet the 39 degree morning air, salty air.

Puget Sound is one, maybe two, blocks from my front door. I walked across the bridge to the water’s edge. Space Needle behind me, mountains all around me, I became aware of the cozy combination of city, water, and hill all mashed into this puzzle that clicks place, people, and time into a panoramic view of past, present, and future.  

I find myself wanting to be in it. All of it. The Olympics, cold and crisp, tower over the Sound like an adult to a child, and the city tries to fight back—the rebellion of its youth. The city is in reach: the water so cold it does not welcome me and the mountains so far they seem surreal and unattainable—the clouds of the ground.

I sat on a rock and listened. The water lapping against the rocks overrode even the loudest of city streets and siren echoes. I had been afraid of the constant bumble of city life, but the water gives me hope. Even still, I know my ears will ring when I go back to Pennsylvania in April. When I lie in my bed in my lime-green room and hope for the frogs to start their song at the dam, yet knowing that the season’s all too soon.

Seattle feels like Spring already.

When I woke up this morning and saw light in the window and blue in the sky, I imagined myself never leaving this city.