My first experience of Seattle was darkness. Riley had been living there for a year already; he knew the jewel of summer ahead. But I had spent the past six months in the heat of North Carolina, in humidity thick as molasses, with a reprieve only from the coastal winds at our favorite beach. Riley and I honeymooned across the country, taking a southwestern route. We drove my little hatchback, its backseat bursting with all of my belongings, through the prairie lands of Arkansas, the unending plains of Texas and New Mexico, the dry red rock deserts of Arizona, the warm beaches of California, finally making our way up the rugged west coast to our new home in Seattle.
We arrived just before Halloween, two weeks before the fall time change. After months of heat and sun, I felt lost in a strange wet world. Rain dripped daily, chilling me to the bone. Darkness fell at 4:30 p.m., turning the newness of an unexplored city into an eerie shadowland.
I was hired as the office manager of an architecture firm in February, in an office downtown, about a twenty minute walk from our apartment. For a long time I wore three layers of pants to work—tights and leggings and trousers. I had a heater under my desk to dry out the hems, which had soaked up water from the sidewalks on my commute. No one carried umbrellas, and neither did I. Instead, I arrived in the lobby with wet hair and a dripping raincoat, slick and slippery like the drenched rats that scurried past on the streets.
The saving grace for me that first winter was hiking. I spent most of my teenage years indoors, sheltered from the North Carolina heat in an air-conditioned room, reading books or watching TV. But I remember climbing my grandmother’s magnolia tree as a kid, digging mud pies in her flower bed, tunneling under the porch at my other grandparents’ house, and jumping hay bales through the chicken shed with my sister and cousin. My childhood wasn’t nature deprived—I lived on farmland, but unlike my husband, I’d never spent much time hiking or camping. My part of North Carolina is notably flat, swampy, and buzzing with mosquitoes.
At some point that winter, my husband and I started hiking every weekend. At first, short hikes close to the city, and then multi-mile day hikes in the Cascades. We hiked through switchbacks in the rain, admiring the gargantuan ferns growing along the forest paths, the soft pine needles underfoot, the vivid evergreens sheltering us. We hiked in the snow with our dog, and once, we lost our trail entirely, following his sure feet back down the mountain. We camped in the rain, slid down snowy cliff sides with friends, scrambled up peak trails crusted with ice. By the time spring and summer circled around, when the glacial lakes grew warm enough for a freezing swim and the wildflowers bloomed in alpine meadows, we were hooked.
Now that we are back in North Carolina, we regularly long for the Pacific Northwest. Moving from Seattle has often felt like grief, like a part of us has been ripped away. Now that we have children, we feel its absence more acutely. We want our children to experience the wonder of it, the wild of it. To explore the rugged beauty of an old growth forest, to skip stones and search for starfish in the cold Puget tide pools. We wait and we plan and we hope to get back there someday.
In the meantime, we make do. Our suburban neighborhood backs up to a forest trail with a waterfall and a small creek. We make the short walk weekly, and my kids splash through the runoff. We bathe after—I don’t want to think too hard about what contaminants might be in the water. It’s a little gift, this creek, and almost exclusively ours. We’ve balanced on logs, built dams, and made forts. We’ve climbed boulders to peek over the waterfall, sent leaf boats sailing through the stream. My son has played there since he could walk, and while it isn’t Seattle, sometimes, especially after a rain, it could be. Today, after a few days of heavy rain, we found an old tree felled at the end of the trail. Its long trunk, already rotten and covered in fungi, had tumbled into the water of the creek. All the rain had washed out the sand, which piled up along the sides of the creek making a wide bank. My son delights in this place—each time we visit it is new. We see the colors of the leaves as they change, watch the poison ivy as it grows and fades, taste the bounty of blackberries and honeysuckle. It is his place, and I am learning to appreciate its magic.
Mothering in this digital age, full of unsolicited advice and social marketing, makes my anxious thoughts grow like kudzu. I have so many fears of doing things wrong, so many ideas of right things that get left undone, so much guilt over my repeated failures. But here, in this one wild corner, I find peace. My children thrive, we appreciate God’s good world, and we come out of the forest changed, little by little, every time.
Today’s Everyday Joy:
