Seattle.
It's GORGEOUS (just like my dear friend Kara who drove up from Missoula to join me there for a few days).
My parents live in a perfect little seaside town, Edmonds, three blocks from the Puget Sound and just around the corner from a fabulous Thai restaurant (among many other amazing eating establishments and endless coffee bars).
A five or ten minute stroll out Mom and Dad's front door takes you down to the coast, which is unlike other US coastal lines in that it is free from horrible, towering commercial establishments and instead sports walking paths, a swimming beach (complete with underwater paths that twist around a sunken ship), and beautiful sculptures thrown oh, anyhow, around the place. Here's a favorite:
On a Saturday morning, my parents can rub the sleep from their eyes, pop down to the corner pancake house, whip through the incredible farmer's market, snatching up some plump cherries and a huge bouquet of purple balloon flowers and brilliant orange poppies, and then, hungry for fish and chips, take the rather clean, rather sophisticated ferry
where you can watch dolphin fins rising out of the rolling water or try to make sense out of the unbelievable size of
Mount Rainier in the distance on one hand or the Cascades rising like imperial sisters on the other.
Or you can just enjoy the wind in your hair.
My main porpoise (ha!) in Seattle (besides drooling enviously all over the bugless, diseaseless flowers--unbelievable roses, lavender--on every corner) was to settle my parents' little condominium. It's not the first house I've decorated for them, and I was lucky enough to get this one--a challenging downsize from their large Baltimore suburban house. (Here's a before:)
My parents wanted something a little more sophisticated than their last house and so we opted for a blue/black/white scheme, appropriate to their proximity to the beach (without being "beachy--" ug).
We put together endless flatpacked furniture, installed endless curtain rods, opted for endless smart storage.
We even tucked my father's office into a (now doorless) closet.
And now they are ready to party.
I arrived back east to sweet, fresh-faced girls and a champion Daddy who had taken said girls camping in my absence. The garden exploded in my absence (in a industrious way), and I am happy to be home. Seattle leaves me with a want for more sophistication, a longing for Thai food, my parents, and the ability to walk everywhere, but with a sense that I am in the right place, too, among the warm green hills of Pennsylvania and my own community.
