Everything Changed. Again.
On the ever drifting boundaries, and the necessity of change.
My brother Jerry and I have spent the last three years living in close enough proximity to each other here in the Pacific Northwest, that we’ve grown fairly close. Our (and America’s, of course) favorite pastime is going to baseball games and we both became Seattle Mariners fans pretty quickly after arriving here. T-Mobile Park is a great place to see a game, and in the past year, we figured out the light rail transit system well enough that it made it easy to get on a train on a Sunday and ride up to the park, and ride back when it was over. But the memories I have of the ball games we’ve seen together are just beautiful and really connective for me. And I’m going to miss it.
After five years here in the Puget Sound, Sue and I have sold the house, said goodbye to wonderful friends and neighbors and moved in temporarily with my sister-in-law. By the end of the month, we’ll be living in Caldwell, Idaho, a place we never expected to live and for the first time ever for Sue, and the first time since I was 18 for me, living away from the west coast. More salient, perhaps, is that we’ll be living far from any truly major metropolis. We’ve become part of that statistic of people who’ve gone “ex-urban.”
Five years ago, in the summer of 2021, when the world was just emerging from the craziness and stupidity of that time, Sue happened upon a little brick house in a Lakewood, WA neighborhood of 100 and 200 foot trees, where sunlight dappled through and bald eagles circled. We knew we were home and looking back on it now, the whole thing seems much more seamless than it actually was. But we bought the house, moved in and began our new lives here in the Pacific Northwest.
As most people who come to live here will tell you, it’s not hard to fall in love with the place. This region is benevolent, beautiful, constantly changing and full of awesome surprises. The bald eagles that nested above our homes high up were both audible and visible on a near daily basis. During a couple of springs, we could hear the new additions to their families. The raccoons that showed up regularly on our camera system featuring the little dudes running around the driveway, hanging on to the fences and sniffing out trash were like comedy reels, sometimes for days and nights in a row. One night, a deer wandered through and was eating the bushes in our front yard in a driving rain.
From the house, it’s a little less than a mile through the neighborhood to the fringe of Fort Steilacoom park and its woods. I’ve spent nearly every day of my five years (except when I traveled away and was once too sick to go) walking through those woods with first Simon, and now Seamus. Both dogs relished those woods and during these last few days, I still drive over there from my sister-in-law’s where we’re now hold up until escrow clears in Idaho and the real estate and mortgage gods work their will.
About five minutes north of us is the little town of Steilacoom, which sits directly on Puget Sound. It’s both beautiful and practical as they have a small, mostly un-busy post office there, and the glass recycle bins are at the community center there, so a couple of times a month, the dogs and I have driven over, parked at the top of the town at the community center and dumped the empties, and switch-backed our way down its streets to the Sound’s shore where the ferry boat docks from Anderson Island. Before we moved here, Sue and I spent our 25th anniversary on Anderson and it’s where we all learned to love it here.
The past five years has seen us fit in and fill in to a diverse community of lovely people from all walks of life, share our stories and time together and now we find ourselves uprooting from what we’ve so recently created. At the center of it all, our “little brick house in the woods,” that came to be the base camp for every adventure, and the comfort zone when it was needed most.
It’s there in that little brick house that we set up a kind of perimeter defense against the period between 2022 and 2023 when our daughter needed, sought and got serious help for an illness none of us were prepared for. As I’ve written before, that’s not my story to tell, so I’ll leave that piece alone. But that time saw us retreat into our nest, and it became the place from which we all began to grow again. Sue and I sought out help as well because we came up short when wondering what to do. When we got the counseling we needed, the house was the place that felt like a fortress. It was comfortable, well-supplied, with a warm and inviting interior and an expansive, green and verdant exterior. It was in that home that we finally had to decide to let go of Simon when he got too sick to carry on. And it was there that Seamus came to live with us, and became Shannon’s best friend and help mate while she recovered.
Seamus knows it as his home and consequently, when we walk over at the park now, he will often direct himself toward the woods and up the trails to walk that way. Once I noticed him doing this, I tried to gently steer him back down the path—and it worked, the first time. After that, he became stubborn and now he’ll simply walk that way and will, on occasion, refuse my admonitions to change course. I have to gently pull on his harness from the handle on it, rather than the leash. He wants to go home. He had a hard life previously, and I confess to a bit of heartache when realizing that moving again is going to torment him a little. We’ve determined simply to not leave him entirely alone in these next days because doing so will drive him just a little crazy.
And while the forces of escrow have been extended just a little, the move out of this magical place, this Shire, is upon us and we’re bidding it a proper goodbye with promises of returning to visit friends and, for now, family, who will stay here a while longer. Cooler weather still thins the nights just a bit, but summer is coming and at least occasional sunny days are upon us. One of the things we’ll miss most here are the lush summers where 75 degrees feels hot until the sun goes down around 9 or 9:30 pm and an evening by the fire pit or with a light pullover suffices.
I’ve got many more stories to tell, but the time to tell them has to wait as we put wheels in motion. I’ll see you soon, from the other side of the Cascades and over by the Owyhee and Boise mountains…
This is a beautiful elegy (not sure if that is the right word) to the beautiful life you all created in the PNW. I am hopeful for many new adventures in your new home. Peace, my brother.