home again, home again

My parents just wrapped up a week-long visit to Bellingham and its environs. We drove the North Cascades Highway, hiked in the Chuckanuts, biked Lopez Island, ate oysters and salmon, visited Re-Bar and Butchart Gardens in Victoria, and otherwise indulged in the local summer pleasures.

What surprised me about their visit, though, was how their presence made Washington feel more like home; something about showing my parents around made me feel less like a long-term visitor here. "Lawrence" is no longer the first place name that comes to mind when someone asks where I live, and I hesitate a little less upon hearing that question.

a taxonomy of signs

There are those happy constellations of events out of which one can infer deeper meaning, particularly if given to a literary bent. By these I mean those circumstances under which the sighting of place names or allusions to books, people, or cultural trends confirm the secret plans, the wisps of desire, the half-formed hopes to which we have yet to give voice. We see in them what we want to see, seeking confirmation outside ourselves.

And then there are those coincidences that come upon us suddenly, speaking in softer tones and so different in scope and imagination from the life we'd imagined for ourselves that those other signs cheapen in comparison. From these latter, I can only surmise that the universe intends that I do something related to China. Or perhaps Toronto.

shadows in green and gray

After slogging through essays and exams and more essays, the academic year ended with the usual, oddly anti-climactic euphoria. To celebrate-and punctuate-this annual change of pace, summer's official arrival, we trekked up to Mt. Baker. It was a return to winter, the rains clinging stubbornly to the foothills and the snow still firmly in command at higher elevations. With warmer temperatures in the forecast, the word on the street was that things would be changing quickly.

But for the moment, though, things were as they had been. The fog hid the views of the river below, and the salal and cedars crowded the trail. Spring appeared only in traces, the bright orange columbine growing alongside a small cascade fed by the nascent spring melt, and lupine, smaller and less exuberant than that in town, rising in delicate purple spikes among the undergrowth. As we climbed higher, the brush ceded to old-growth forest, massive Douglas firs and hemlocks along steep slopes. At the snow line, the trees gave way to an expansive bowl. The clouds sucked in, so that all was grayish white above and below, with only smudges of exposed rock at the rim and the darker, crumpled snow marking our path.

And then, improbably, the clouds parted, revealing patches of genuine blue. The sky lightened in that way that it does here, in which the clouds lessen and the sun casts shadows without revealing itself. We watched the cloud bank moving back along the trail we had ascended, and then, shivering in the cold wind moving down off the snow, turned to follow it.

between extremes

Summers in Washington are, for me, easy to love. The days are long, the berries are plentiful, and the temperatures rise to a pleasant 85 degrees. Sometimes. Summer in Kansas often feels like an endurance test: the ticks, the 100-degree heat, the summer storms of May and June and the searing hot winds of late August. The summer off-sets the endurance test that is a Kansas winter, creating something akin to a balance of extremes. For years, I buffered myself against the cold winds of winter and the summer heat waves by imagining life in a land less mercurial, more temperate in its weather patterns.

Having settled in western Washington, however, the lack of climatic intensity feels odd. Winter was as expected, wet and dark, with the rare bright day counted as an unexpected gift. Spring, though, oh, spring; you caught me unaware. In Kansas, spring is an exuberant, if uneven, extraction from winter's icy grip. Things change. They melt, they give birth, they burst forth. What was once barren, brown, and frozen now heaves with life (often, with insect life), marking a hectic transition from winter to summer. In Washington, spring creeps. It is subtle, the days slowly lengthening, the brighter leaves of deciduous trees filling in the gaps among the evergreens, the shading in of pale new growth at the tips of the Douglas firs and hemlocks. I, the impatient Kansan, frequently missed the cues, my body still attuned to weather patterns over a thousand miles to the east.