1. That I can stand on the sidewalk between the chamaecyparis and the house and look to my left and see the Olympic Mountains’ sawtoothed outline amid a crowd of softer shoulders. And then I can swivel 180 degrees and extend my vision over the nearby University District Ridge and then some 40 miles to the nearest foothills and low mountains of the Cascade Range. What’s that? Seventy miles a second? I used to imagine, when I was the age of my students, that I could leap from any point to another on the horizon of my vision, teleporting.
2. The restful bright beauty of our bedroom. Painted white except for a ruby red alcove holding the couch and fountain. It is bounded on three sides by a bank of many-paned windows looking down on sidewalk traffic, giving a peak of the western mountains. On one wall hangs the quilt my dad made of my granddad’s colorful ties—best family heirloom. Our favorite piece of furniture, the bed, is across from those windows, against the southern wall. Sacred objects speaking of our love adorn dressers and wall.
3. Being able to walk around the corner in slippers and sweatpants to our small, well-stocked and unadorned grocery market. Being able to call in an order for General Tso’s Chicken and pick it up across the street and through the little parking lot. Or walking a block up Greenwood to an award-winning neighborhood tavern that serves major league gumbo and the best reuben sandwiches in town. The friendly corner hardware store is a block the other direction, down Greenwood and across the street from a little snobby video store.
4. The patio that is paved in brick, bordered by the house and two high, perpendicular fences that are festooned with clematis and backed by bamboo and a tall cedar. It’s comforting knowing that the neighbors are all close and that we all share the illusion of privacy.
5. The yellow desert orange of our living room, soft sage of my office and the kitchen’s three shades of ecru…not the lavendar, though, and not the Las Vegas bathroom.
6. Being able to drop in on Daughter #2’s utterly hapless but good-natured life.
7. The abundant white cupboards, faux granite counters and picture window of our kitchen, the house's entryway with its split stairs going half a floor up and half a floor down brightened by the puttin’-on-airs cathedral window.
8. The brutish crow brothers who sit on the phone line in front, or at the top of the neighbor's birch and scraw complaints. And the rustling and sideways scrambling of Sammy and Sally Squirrel who have a nest in the ash above our patio adn use the fence top as their highway. And finally, the occasional racoon and occasionaler possum and occasionaest cougar that BFF swears she heard scream in the night last week.
9. All the friendly homeless men selling their publication, Real Change, in front of the market. The small, blond parrot woman with the eponymous birds on her hand and shoulder, always willing to engage in friendly conversation about such issues as the herbal therapy one of them is taking for his obsessive feather plucking. Occasionally seeing my friend Coby, with whom I share a similar Heartland upbringing, at the market. Terry and Roger, with his fake tan and dye job, the couple who own the twee gift shop around the corner. Ellen and Chester with their imagined dramas.
I pray to God that I have some warning before I die and can feel the appreciation for my surroundings at least as much as I have sealed and stamped in my mind and heart the value of where we are living now, for the next 4 days.
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