How is it September already? I have been in Bellevue for one full year and thought that today would be the day I moved back into Seattle. Place is very important. I have spent the last year not making friends here, because I didn’t want to put down roots in a place with a mall full of stay at home moms with zombie eyes. With neighbours who look at me funny when I say I am walking to the park instead of driving. With people who drive their dogs to the park so they can take them for a walk. I know that there are an incredible amount of cool people suffering in silence, just like me, but I can’t do suburbia. I have ONE good friend here. Thank Carlin for Jazz Singing Jennifer. It is important to have a day time friend to whom you can pour out your heart and vice versa, where there are no secrets and no pretense. I consider myself lucky to have found her. I know this crushing loneliness is for the most due to my wanting to be separate, and not integrate into the Bellevue community. It still feels a little like cheating on Almonte, my heart home. Last night though, I started looking at places in Seattle, online. I found a few that seemed great. I got responses. Today I looked at three very different homes. A dream place up in the quiet part of Capitol Hill, tucked away near Volunteer Park, with a locally owned cafe on the same block. I fell in love. I wanted to camp out there until they gave it to us. I am terrified they won’t. If we moved there I would have to budget like crazy, but I wouldn’t have to drive, ever. Everything is in walking distance for me. It is what I thought I was moving to when I agreed to move to Seattle. In the middle of everything. I want to send my roots down into a Seattle neighbourhood that makes me feel at home. Having two kids and a dog might make this dream impossible. Like I am oft found saying, one child in Capitol Hill is a hipster accessory, and two children makes you a crazy person. Still I want to raise city babies. Children who see a variety of lifestyles and who are accepting of difference. Kids who are comfortable with a comedian for a mom, and a programmer for a father. I want to be able to write in cafes when the kids are in school, and walk to a comedy show at night. This past year made a kind of sense. It was close to TSM’s work. This next year will be about being close to mine. There is a fairness. Then we can make a real decision for next September and set down real roots.

Name the trees that stood in the neighbourhood where you grew up.

I think the  plum tree in my front yard would have been called Walter. He was sloppy, and his plums not terribly edible, but he grew them with pizazz and threw them all over the ground every summer to remind us that he was there, and had dreams of jam. Our sour cherry tree in the back would have been called Celeste. She raised her branches to the sky, and though I never ate one of her cherries, because she never bore them, it didn’t stop me wishing I would be there the day she finally fruited. There were two twin Oak trees, I think, that dwarfed our house. At least that is how I remember them. I was smaller then. I would give them grand names. Like Alexander (I named everything Alexander back then) and Alexandra. Strong names. Defenders of human kind. I am sure trees have their own secret names. Like cats and dandelions. Still I love to anthropomorphize.