Why is it that something I don't care about in the least if you just ask me about it can yet smack me across the psyche when unexpectedly encountered? Ceej's journal mentions she stayed at a B&B on Mercer Island, and I was so utterly broadsided by the casual reference to my hometown that I couldn't continue reading for a minute.
In fact, I've never gotten used to the notion that Seattle is now on the map. It was such a backwater when I was growing up there. I gladly fled to the bright lights of San Francisco when I turned 25, and, barring two months of initial homesickness, never really wanted to go back. I was so engrossed in my exciting new life that I didn't pay any attention to the founding and growth of MicroSoft, although I did have some friends from school go to work for them. I heard people complaining about all the Californians moving up there, but I didn't think that sounded especially dire, not being in the house-buying crowd. My first real clue as to the breadth of changes was when my folks told me they'd bought a place in Woodinville in 1989.
"All the way out in the sticks?" I said doubtfully, knowing my parents. They assured me it was now a part of the East Side (east of Lake Washington, wherein lies Mercer Island) and quite chic. I had a hard time picturing it until I actually visited them, since Woodinville was previously rural. All this is just to illustrate the fact that I left Seattle just in time to miss it becoming THE hip place to live. And you know what? I'm kind of glad. This way, I didn't have to watch it change. I just came back years afterwards and suddenly found it had been transformed out of recognition in certain ways. Shocking, a bit, but better than watching the slow creep of unwanted changes and being unable to do anything about them.
I fell in love with the Bay Area, and thought it was a fine substitution for the land of my youth. Of course, I could get to Seattle quickly and I often did. Looking back, trapped here in the vast, heat-laden, tobacco-growing lowlands of the central south, the two cultures aren't very different. I realize I am happiest somewhere on the west coast and that people really are different on the other side of the mountains (the Cascades which become the Sierra as they head south towards Mexico).
Anyway, now Ceej knows why people are so fond of the Pacific Northwest, with its beautiful blues and greens and whites, the wild shorelines, the verticality of the landscape. I miss that soul-filling beauty more than I can adequately express, because it's something like trying to explain why I can't breathe properly without enough oxygen. It's necessary to me; all the same, I can make do if I must.
Breathe deeply for me, Ceej.
