Belonging

One of the things I like best about my part-time job at the ballpark comes into full flower now in midsummer, when I get to talk with people visiting us from all over the world. Many are in Seattle at the start or the end of a cruise to Alaska. Others are here to escape their hot weather back home. That's a roll of the dice--it can be warm and sunny here one day, as it was yesterday, or rainy and coolish, but there's always something to do on those days, too.

Earlier this year, I felt like running away--from the long, dark Seattle winter, and from a house that never really felt like home after Tom was gone, because Tom was my home. I soon realized that I needed to stay in Seattle to tie up loose ends here, anyway, and it would take most of this year--so I signed a short lease for the place I'm living now, nearly certain I would move on this fall. But now I'm nearly certain that I won't.

For one thing, I have moved five times since 2012, and I'd just like to stay put for a while. I like my apartment a lot, and I may well have to move again in a few years as urban renewal proceeds all around the low-slung 1950s courtyard complex I currently call home.

Mostly, though, it's the trees and the sea telling me to stay put. In June, I drove to a special place on Hood Canal, Harmony Hill, where Tom and I attended a stem cell transplant survivors' weekend just two months before he died. As I walked the labyrinth around an amazing old tree, I heard myself or someone or something tell me, "There's a reason you're here."

I heard the same thing last week while at family camp on Seabeck Bay, as I took communion with the herons and seals and my human beloveds--and again yesterday, my birthday, as I treated myself to an afternoon spent looking for (and finding) more seals, orcas, eagles, and other neighbors from the wild world. The truth is, I was just happy to be out on the Salish Sea on a glorious summer day; the animals were a bonus.  And today, it is raining, which I've come to feel is just fine, too, especially if it keeps our forests dry after two summers aflame.

This post is, yet again, about allowing myself to change my mind and about being a work in progress, even well into my sixth decade of life. It's partly about connecting to a place I didn't necessarily choose when I first moved here to be closer to Tom, but a place that apparently has chosen me.

There's a reason I'm here. Maybe it's to be an unofficial ambassador to the people I meet at the ballpark, or in line as we wait for our boat trip. Maybe it's to help new neighbors learn English--something I plan to do as a volunteer once I earn my TEFL credential next winter. Maybe it's even to take a full-time job at the company for which I've been freelancing for a couple of years, or at the university or the library. Maybe it's something I've yet to discover. More will be revealed, I'm quite sure.

PS You can read more of my writing about Seattle and nearby here. And if you're an editor looking for a feature story or essay about the Pacific Northwest, it's your lucky day because I'm your huckleberry.

Enough

I bought a salad spinner yesterday. It wasn't an impulse buy; I'd thought about it a few weeks. Now that I live in 400 square feet, I think harder than ever before adding anything new to my store of possessions.

The salad spinner (ironically made of plastic) won out because I'm trying to use less plastic, so I've stopped buying those oh-so-convenient plastic tubs of pre-washed salad greens--yet I'd quickly grown tired of drying rinsed spinach on towels on my tiny countertop. Yet more irony: I've actually found in previous experience that these salad spinners don't work all that well. Maybe I add too much water? Let me know if you have tips.

Or maybe I should just look at a YouTube video or two ... which brings me to my point for this post: I have an essay in the summer issue of 3rd Act Magazine on "Just Enough Technology." When my friend, the magazine's editor Victoria, asked me to write an article on "Technology We Love," I agreed, as long as I could write a sidebar about bringing balance to our technological lives. It's the second in my series of "enough" essays for the magazine; I wrote about "Just Enough News" last year. "Just Enough Space" might be the theme I explore next. After five months in this little apartment, I am discovering like never before what it really means to live a simple, streamlined life, and I like it very much. 

I'll write about that some more another time. Meanwhile, I'm not trying to lifehack my way into getting "just enough" sleep, eating "just enough" food, or experiencing "just enough" love. Instead, I'm trying to learn how to live as intentionally and yes, as joyfully, as I can in a world where hundred-year floods are happening every year and Alaska suddenly feels like California.

My kitchen cabinet, new salad spinner up top