You Can Go Home Again...

...just don't expect it to be unaltered.

Several months ago, daughter Emma sent me a card that says, "Sometimes right back where you started from is where you belong." I have just returned from a visit to where I started from, the Pacific Northwest, specifically Washington. I have been away, except for visits, for 35 years; and still it is my soul home.

In my growing up years, my parents and two sisters and I spent many hours at Mt. St. Helens. We camped and canoed at Spirit Lake and picnicked and picked wild huckleberries on the pumice-strewn slopes of the mountain. St. Helens was a gem of beauty in the Cascade range back then, before May 18, 1980. Small, graceful, and perfectly symmetrical, it was an accessible mountain, in a sense. We could go right up onto the slope in our shorts and tennis shoes; crampons, pick axes, and ropes were not needed. In my memory it didn't have walking trails, or huge alpine meadows like Mt. Rainier does; or a lodge with a restaurant and gift shop. You couldn't buy ice cream or soft drinks at a snack bar, or sit in front of an enormous fire place; I don't even remember bathrooms. There weren't a lot of people.

We could see the mountain from our house, too. In fact, when Daddy was scouting out places to build a house, he climbed a big leaf maple tree on the side of a hill to get above the trees to see the view. It happened to be a clear day, and what he saw at the end of Saltzer Valley, was Mt. St. Helens.

The mountain is changed now, as all things change. It has a hole in its perfect slope; the old growth forests are turned to ash and blown away. Spirit Lake is a shadow of its former self. But the mountain is coming back. When my mom and I visit our old friend week before last we find a wildflower garden amidst the twisted and shattered gray tree stumps. We discover that the dome in the hole in the mountain, the hole which could once swallow the space needle, has grown to make the crater convex rather than concave. It is taking on more the shape of Rainier, which erupted 5000 years ago, leaving a similar tear in its side that no one talks about, because it has "always" been that way. It also has a visitor center with bathrooms. And lots of people. There are no huckleberries, but there is a new lake––Coldwater––that is serene and beautiful. The lake is there because the mountain changed.

I spend hours walking around Wallingford, the Seattle neighborhood where Emma lives with her partner, Wynne. In mid-summer, unlike in Raleigh where the heat has reduced our gardens to the hardiest survivors, the flowers are spectacular. Some of them are familiar and many are not. The gardens in the Emerald City, the city of seven big hills and innumerable small ones, are crammed into rocks and retaining walls. Flowers and vegetables grow in curbside strips between street and sidewalk. Though they are visually unfamiliar, the gardens feel like home.

Emma and Wynne live in an altered schoolhouse. The Wallingford Center was, from 1904 until the early 70s, the Interlake Elementary School. After sitting vacant for many years it was saved from destruction and is now the home of shops and studio apartments with enormous windows. The oak staircases are worn at the ends from generations of small feet tramping up one end and down the other. There is soon to be a reunion of people who attended the school. They will find it altered, and beautiful. On a tour of my alma mater, the University of Washington, with Emma, we make an incredible discovery. After growing up on the other side of the country, her work office is literally around the corner from her dad's college apartment and her mom's post-college duplex.

Emma, Wynne, and I drive aboard one of the Evergreen State ferries (name altered, only God know why, to Washington Ferry System) for a Puget Sound crossing to explore Whidbey Island. On the way to the ferry we stop at their favorite vegan-donuts-to-die-for that won some best-donut-in-the-universe award, and deservedly so. (Yumminess is rivaled the following week by Mollie Moon's raspberry balsamic and lavender honey ice-creams.) We fall in love with the town of Langley and traipse around the Loganberry Festival out in a field in the middle of the island. Oddly we see no loganberry anything.

While in Seattle, I visit with Amelia, my cyber-friend who stumbled on this blog several months ago and wrote to me. I responded and we have been reading each others' blogs and emailing ever since. It is lovely to sit at table with her. Amelia is a Headstart teacher, and writes about life in her classroom. Her writing is a garden (http://onesunflower.wordpress.com). She writes in her post after our visit, "I find the intimacy that develops between readers and writers of blogs to be intriguing... Publishing and reading blogs has my heart traipsing about the world and over thresholds I will never see with my eyes. I have become like writers everywhere: sprinkling crumbs on the ground, leading one another over new pathways." We are like old friends, making easy conversation. This is why we write. This is home.

I ride the rails (a genius idea) in the observation car of the Coast Starlight to Centralia, 80 miles south of Seattle, to visit my mom and my sister. Rebecca has purchased and beautifully renovated an old building on the town's main street and is transforming a crumbling parking lot into a sculpture garden. It is now her home, and the home of Hubbub, a contemporary home decor/gift/jewelry art house (http://hubbubshop.com). Her store and her courtyard would be a garden, even if there were no flowers.

The house where I spent the second half of my childhood is not a great deal altered on the inside; but the outside is different. The crates, buckets, and cans full of stones, shells, and driftwood we couldn't bear to leave at the beach over the years are still piled under the carport shed. But the maple tree Daddy climbed, and I climbed with my book to escape unnoticed among the leaves, succumbed to old age a few years back. It had been cabled together for years to keep its huge double trunk from splitting. But disease and decay finally brought it down, as all things must end. My 95-year-old mom has beautiful flower beds now, not the same ones I remember––they are in places I once had to mow. I wish they had been gardens then. The apple trees my dad refused to plant until after I had left home, because "If I had planted them ten years ago, they would be bearing fruit now," are bearing fruit. Proof that it is never too late. 

I was home for a visit some years ago when the chainsaws roared in our guts as they began clearcutting the forest where I played, rode horseback, and mapped trails––cutting new ones where no feet had trod before. My parents were instrumental in saving a large area of those woods, getting the city to buy and preserve it. The rest is coming back now. Altered, and beautiful.

I turn into the driveway of the four-plex on Ford's Prairie where I began married life 36 years ago. Where we looked out over a cow pasture through the sliding glass doors at the back, there is now a two-story apartment building a few feet from the door. The row of trees at the "new" high school, from which my class of 1970 was the first to graduate, are enormous. The duplex where my first boyfriend lived is now a single unit. I sent Marc a picture, and even he didn't recognize it. The tiny grocery next to his house, where had I been a senior at the old high school nearby (long since torn down), I would have been allowed to frequent at lunchtime, is boarded up.

Mother and I drive to Olympia, home during the first half of my childhood. We visit the old post office, another building scheduled for destruction, but saved by being put on the National Register of Historic Buildings. It is now the charitable giving offices of the Secretary of State. I had forgotten or didn't realize that my mother worked there, on the second floor, as a secretary in the National Park Service office. I only remembered my father's office being there, when he worked for the Forest Service Experimental Research Station (or some such). You know how sometimes you don't really remember things cerebrally, but rather in your body? I am six––or five or seven––and after a day of shopping we visit Daddy. Climbing the open curved marble stairs to the second floor, and then then the enclosed stairs to the attic offices, I pull one of those flimsy cone-shaped cups from the holder by the water cooler and fill it up. I hold it very carefully, because if it is squeezed the water erupts out of the top. Maybe I am not so careful. I ask for, and we receive, a tour of the building not open to the public. My mother recognizes her office. I recognize the stairs. It is altered, but it feels like home.

We visit Priest Point Park, where I loved to play when stopped there after my big sister's piano lesson. My favorite and clearest memory is of the double swings. There are several there now, but one has a moss covered roof and seems to be in a protected area. Could it possibly be the original? We drive out to South Bay, where we lived. There is the school where I imagined myself second grade queen of the flying rings. The rings are gone, the school remodeled––or perhaps rebuilt.

There is the low-tide mudflat of a fork of the south bay of Puget Sound. It looks just the same, though surely the water routes have changed many times. There is the Dockins' family's ramshackle house, looking much the same. And there is our...oh my god. It is gone. The sweet little house with the "new room" Daddy transformed from the garage and the porch my mother's trailing roses grew over. The last time we were there, the split rail fence Daddy built was gone––no doubt it rotted and fell apart; but now there is a tall privacy fence, which cannot hide the McMansion behind it; with an equally big garage or barn or what the hell is that? The neighbor's house is gone too, to make room for the monstrosity. Okay, we did not need to see that. Altered, and not good. Coming back out we pass the country store. Fully expecting a convenience store to be pumping gas on the site, we are stunned again to find the store, built in the 1930s, intact. We nearly weep with relief.

I return to Seattle from Centralia, after the Tuesday morning small-town-charming pet parade at the Carnegie library, and spend the morning with my camera at Pike Place Market, a very old public market that was threatened while I was a student at the University of Washington. I signed a petition to save it, and it is now one of Seattle's most popular tourist destinations, as well as a favorite gathering place of locals. I take pictures of people, street artists, fruit and vegetables and berries, fresh cut flowers and gardens-on-a-pole, and fish. I wish I could digitally preserve the smells of the market: the international foods and fresh bread, the flowers and seafood. The market is pretty much unaltered, at least visually. (Hopefully it is structurally more sound.)

The Olympic and Cascade mountain ranges, still ring the city. Mt. Rainier, which will one day––any day now, in fact––erupt again, for now still rises from time-to-time over the city. It peeks up over the shipyard on the Sound, rises above the industrial zones, pops into view as one rounds a curve. "The mountain is out!" is the celebratory cry of natives when the often overcast days clear to the bluest skies you've ever seen and the mountain reveals its spectacular self. It does not alter––yet––but like home, it is not always evident. We don't go there on this trip because there is still too much snow. Perhaps the result of global weather change. I guess it is altered.

My home in Raleigh when I return, is a bit altered. A teenager has been living here in my absence. My things are not quite in the same places, and she has left behind a few items that have not been in my home for some time. It makes me laugh. My garden is still struggling to survive the dreadful heat. My home is a bit altered, but it is still mine. For now.




Pondering the Immensity of Change
A mountain collapses
A superheated stone-wind roars across the land,
wave upon wave of pumice and ash erupt,
all this in a few hours' time,
and on such a scale it challenges our comprehension.
     Now the change comes more slowly.
     The pull of gravity and the erosive action of rain sculpt a new landscape.
     A forest gradually returns, revealing the process of renewal.
     Once again nature's subtle rhythms prevail. 
         Until the next time...
(Interpretive sign at Mt. St. Helens)

One of the benefits of aging that I most love is that, if we pay attention, we become a witness to the large and small changes in the world around us as we travel through time and space. And from the smallest flower stamen to the grandiosity of mountains, it is all so interesting. Like Dorothy learned, "home" is transformed by the journey. We are transformed by the quest. The landscape alters, we alter. Or do we become more ourselves?