Seattle.  A different kind of space.

I’ve lived in Seattle for five years, and each fall I fall in love once again with the cool breeze and prolonged summer season that insists on one more week into October.  One more inch of sun is all we need to get our minds ready for one more winter.  Come January, I take a trip to Montana where I am surrounded by the freshest vistas I know.  Apart from my time in Alaska, this is the place I come to first for solace.  I hunker down in my mother’s office watching snow fall off the trees without a single quake of wind.  Maybe it’s a passing doe or the imaginary silence that causes my mind to stir up the words on the page.  I chunk through snow and ice and learn and re-learn how to play.  I talk to our horses, lapsing my arms over their manes, resting the weight of my forehead against their brow until our eyes are one.

And in the midst of each visit home, I offer myself a promise that I will have that space to myself.  I write the promise on a sheet of paper folded and tucked in the space-nobody-knows-about.  I try to remember. I take a picture of all the places I’ve been to and hide them in a box in the basement.  The only one that matters is the one I can remember.  The one I wake up to.  I shake my forehead and fall back on the pillow.  I’ve spent the night in too many cities to take any more photographs.

Coming back into my house I ask myself if this is the space I’ve longed for.  Where do I go from here?  I wake up.  It’s five thirty, August.  I stretch myself over the water of Seward Park.  It is my first run in a year.  I am a fraud.  If I were a real artist I’d build a greenhouse on wheels.  I would wear running shorts.  How many loops do I make before the space I want becomes my own?