Jim is excited that I’m here. He loves this place.
I’m standing on the deck of a co-worker’s home outside of Seattle, on the Puget Sound. The sky is only a shade lighter than the slate waters. It’s drizzling and I’m worried that my hair will get frizzy. But yes, the hills with their 1950s-style houses in pastel blues, yellows, and pinks remind me of tiered gardens, and through the mist I make out blue-green firs and the beginnings of fall oranges and reds.
“It is beautiful,” I tell him.
We almost moved here, me and Jim, before we got married. It was 1989 and I was a year away from finishing graduate school. I had spent almost eight years of my adult life as a college student and decided to go on for a PhD. I loved college life.
I wanted to walk briskly all my mornings across green lawns and past a duck pond, have all my days punctuated by the sounds of a chapel bell and students pushing their way out of musty buildings.
I applied to University of Washington. Jim had come here several times to bike the San Juan Islands and Vancouver. More than once he rode down the coast and across to New Mexico. I pictured Seattle as young, hip, and progressive.
Besides, my favorite weather was rain. It made me introspective—gave me melancholy without the sadness. People warned that Seattle’s constant drizzle was different from New Mexico’s infrequent thunderstorms, that I’d outgrow my fondness after a few days. Yet I insisted I’d love it, and if I didn’t, it wasn’t for forever. Just long enough to get me to another university to teach.
I got to work pulling together my application. I was so confident I’d be accepted that I told Jim to put in for a job transfer with REI, the company he worked for back then. I didn’t bother to visit the university doctoral program or talk to its advisors. I simply sent off my package and waited to hear back.
In the end, Jim got the transfer and I got rejected.
It’s strange how life takes you in directions you don’t intend to go. Choices get made for you, and then you make new ones.
I remember calling the head of the doctoral program after I got my rejection letter—it was the first time I talked to him. He told me they could accept only two students, that the competition was fierce. He mentioned a young woman from Stanford with a 4.0 GPA. I cried for days, sure that my life was ruined.
After graduation I took a job with the local university. The bubble burst after six years. I discovered the college campus was not the place for me—I strained against the bureacracy and emphasis on credentials.
In all those years since that initial sting of rejection, I never pined for Seattle. I filed it away as a city I’d someday like to visit. We talked about coming here for our honeymoon, biking all around, but Jim hurt his wrist and we took a road trip to Jackson, Wyoming instead.
Now here I am. Did I really once dream about getting my doctorate in Seattle and becoming a professor? If it weren’t for Jim’s excitement about my finally being here, I might have forgotten about it altogether.
Nah. I don’t even know why I said that.
Seattle is one of those cities I’ve always wanted to visit.
“It’s strange how life takes you in directions you don’t intend to go. Choices get made for you, and then you make new ones.”
Do you ever sometimes feel as though life takes you towards the choices you didn’t know you made?
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I’m off to Seattle in two weeks! A nice, long girls weekend.
Life takes you where you need to go, not where you think you should go.
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good post–there is always a reason why, as you already know
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Sometimes life throws you upside down into a swimming pool, yet once you get back up and get your bearings straight you look around to see that your in a much better place than you’ve ever anticipated.
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I have been to 46 of the 48 contiguous states. The two elusive states are Washington and Oregon. But reading your Seattle musings makes me realize once again that I really want to explore the Northwest.
I think the prospect of all that rain, though, is a little daunting to me. I like a good rainy day when I’m home – I love to wander in my home with the soft glow of lit lamps on a gray day – but I always hesitate to intentionally go for rain when I’m planning vacations. Maybe that’s why I’m heading to Phoenix and the Southwest. The desert just sounds so much sunnier right now.
I really do want to see the temperate rain forests In Olympia, though. Wonder if I dare start planning a 2009 trip before I’ve taken my 2008 one?
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Seattle is wonderful. My parents lived in Vancouver, BC, for a good few years and I spent all my uni holidays with them (so about a third of each year for three or four years) and I love that part of the world and am busy trying to persuade my other half, who has a Canadian passport, to move there. What you said about rain was interesting …..I grew up in the North of England and I have a love-hate relationship with it but once I go somewhere where it’s scarce, I become melancholy and miss it. It’s part of the rhythm of my childhood and adolescence.
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Do you ever sometimes feel as though life takes you towards the choices you didn’t know you made?
Robin, YES! Settling down with a husband and having a family—looking back now I wonder, When exactly did I make that choice? I know I made, and I wouldn’t change it at all, but there was a time when I thought I was making completely different choices. Yet, here I am.
BTW, great sentence—could easily be turned into a writing practice topic: Where have the choices that you didn’t know you made in life taken you?
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Life takes you where you need to go, not where you think you should go.
Another statement that is so true, tpgoddess. Too bad our trips to Seattle didn’t coincide. It would have been fun to meet up for coffee.
scot, thanks for stopping by. Yes, it all works out.
Neecy!! Sometimes life throws you upside down into a swimming pool… A perfect analogy, girlfriend. Of course, you’ve always been a good swimmer. 8)
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Bo, you describe exactly how I feel when it rains…the wanting wander around inside with the lamps throwing off their soft yellow light. I love it. BTW, I ran into a woman from Roswell, NM, who’d lived in Seattle for six years. She said it took her three to adjust to the rain, but now when she comes back to NM, her sinuses and skin and lips dry out completely. I even when I got back my scalp started itching like mad. The moisture is so nourishing, dryness not.
jo, I can definitely see where the rain and the colors—all of it—would become part of that rhythm, and growing up with that, well, it must be like growing up with the ocean out your window. I mean, something like that is vast in a way.
I know Jim would thrive in cool, wet weather. His grandmother was Swedish, and I feel he has more of her DNA than anyone else’s. And I have that hard-baked DNA of decades, centuries now, of dry air and extremes of hot and cold. (Extremadura, Spain, reminded me of parts of NM.) Ideally we would live summers in cool and rest of the year here.
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ybonesy, welcome back from Seattle. These might be some of my faves of your plane shots. Isn’t Mount Rainier beautiful? Great shots of it. And I also like the shot with that fire red color under the engine.
The first time I saw Mount Rainier, I was driving to Seattle from Missoula. We were taking the backroads and winding through a dense forest, when suddenly, there was an opening and Rainier appeared in full majesty on the horizon. Wow, I was blown away.
I like to visit Seattle. Too rainy and gray to live there. But it was one of the places we used to go to see the “big city” when I lived in Montana. That and Portland, Oregon. I really love the Northwest.
It’s odd the different choices we make and how they completely change the course of our lives. When I was young, I was quicker to make snap decisions, quicker to take risks. These days, if the opportunity came to move half way across the country, it would really take some thought. It would be hard to leave behind all the communities and support systems I have established here.
Do you think you’d ever like to live in Seattle? How did it strike you as a livable city in the short time you were there.
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QM, I wish I would have been able to visit Seattle proper a bit, but I really did love the area. So lush. And I get a good vibe there. It seems like a real mix, sort of how Portland/greater Oregon has that mix of city/small town and urban/rural. I love that and being able to go between the two. It felt like a healthy place to live, clean air to breathe, and so much to do outdoors.
I think we’re pretty settled here and would also find it too overwhelming to move. We might be able to move further north in NM to get into cooler climes, but heading out as far as the Pacific NW, well, that’d would take some super motivation that we just don’t have now. But I wouldn’t rule out anything ten or so years from now.
Yeah, Mt. Rainier is gorgeous. Cool that you could travel so easily to Washington State when you were living in Montana. Did you ever do much hiking in the area?
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this post got me pondering. it’s touched something really deep inside, a dash of nostalgia and melancholy mixed in a whirlpool of reminiscence. finally, seattle 🙂
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Hmmm…
“..the soul finds the past in a clearer light,
and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself
into crystal clearness…” ~Gandhi
I am discovering this more and more. 🙂
Thank you for sharing your world and your words YB… you are so adding to mine!
~g-h
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No, not much hiking in Washington state. I did do quite a bit in Montana when I lived there. I was younger and more motivated. Plus a lot of my friends then were active hikers and cross-country skiers.
In Washington state, I mostly camped. Went down to the wharf. We did go the Vancouver Folk Festival one summer, right across the border. I took a ferry once, saw the San Juans. It really is beautiful there. Yes, like Portland in that it has a small city type feel.
Minneapolis is like that, too, small city feel. But the landscape is completely different. And the West is completely different than the Midwest. Much wilder and more individualist. I hope I get back out to the Northwest in the next few years. I’d like to see some old friends. And of course, the mountains.
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Thanks, aefiel. A whirlpool of reminiscence—feels that way sometimes when we think back on “place.” I know QM and I both write about place a lot, probably because of that ability to swirl in the whirlpool.
suz, thanks for that quote from Gandhi. Wow, that’s a fitting statement for reflection overall and writing about the past.
QM, I should add “visiting San Juan Islands with Jim” to my list of things I want to do before I die. Remember our lists?
QM’s 25 Things I Want To Do Before I Die (LINK)
yb’s Do Or Die–Can’t It Be 27? (LINK)
Reason I should add it is that I remember wanting to go there so much after hearing Jim talk about it—just one of those things that I’d love to see through his eyes.
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Oh my gosh, I’m afraid to go back and look at that list. I’ll have to make time to do that. We should make new lists and see if they are the same as the old ones. Maybe I’ll make a new one before I go back and look.
It’s really fun to visit a place, a landscape, with someone who knows it, or grew up there, or has great passion for that place. Liz was working on her video rendering this last weekend at the studio and she ran across some old footage we had taken of North Dakota, the land her ancestors homesteaded. It was so beautiful. And though I had driven through N.D. many times on the way to Montana, it was a wholly different experience to visit there with her. See her childhood haunts.
It would be fun for you and Jim to go the San Juans on one of your anniversaries. How many years are you going on now? Quite a while, isn’t it? I can totally see you two doing that.
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I know, I already looked at mine and went “ehh”—not sure that I’d keep all the same ones on my list if I were to do it now. Isn’t that wild? When I did it, I honestly felt those were the things I wanted more than anything to do. Some are, but some have faded.
Let’s definitely make new lists soon.
Oh, yeah, Jim and I celebrated 17 years of marriage this summer. Can you believe it!? So we’re going on 18. My sister, who’s only six years older than me, is approaching 30, I think. Wow.
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