August 25, 2010- An Accidental Tourist
Gasworks Park, Seattle
We've had friends from out-of-town with us this month; they love Seattle but can't live here for various practical reasons, so they've decided to rent a house here every summer. It's been great to have the 'everyday' time that you never get with friends who live far away, and I wish they could be here year-round. There's one selfish benefit to their part-time status, though... they retain their 'tourist eyes', and I get to see through them.
I left my old life in Atlanta and moved here because I fell in love with the city, the mountains, the water, the everywhere-green, the bookstores, the indie music, the people wearing fleece and walking their dogs past cottage gardens and Craftsman houses. When I first arrived, everything I saw felt right to me, and everything was new. I couldn't stop staring. Independent coffee shops were kind of a novelty. The grocery stores were full of local, organic food. The women were all wearing comfortable shoes! Sliding into my life here felt just like buttah... it's where I was always supposed to be.
After a while (like, um, 2 weeks?), it felt like home. But the problem with home is that it becomes invisible. You magically stop seeing the pile of junk mail on the table. You get used to the uneven porch step and become totally inured to the drippy faucet, which anyone else would notice in an instant. The things you love about your home (the apron-front sink! the cozy reading corner!) become equally commonplace. And so it went with my new city. I donned fleece and took long walks, moved into a Craftsman house and planted a cottage garden. I became one of Them. A ferry ride ceased to be an adventure and became just another way to get from here to there. It's not that I stopped noticing things- I do smell the roses, literally, all the time. But somehow, becoming a local meant that I began to forget how crazy good it is to live here.
On an ordinary Sunday afternoon, K & D tagged along with us for an outdoor playdate at Gasworks Park with a bunch of friends and their babies. We were all sitting on picnic blankets in the sun, watching our bundles of messy joy crawling over each other, and they looked at each other and said in wonder, "Why don't we live here, again?" So I looked up and around, as they were- at the sailboats and sun on the water, the sparkling city across the lake, the mountains in the distance and the dear friends around us- and it was all beautifully new to me again, like putting on tinted glasses of gratefulness.
During their visit I've been using those lenses to see things as they do- the neighborhood farmers' markets, the hiking trails in the foothills not far away, the masses of fliers for live music and festivals, Puget Sound at sunset- and yes, the fleeced and comfortable Northwesterners. I feel so blessed to live in a place I believe in, and it feels good to appreciate it anew. It's funny how every day you can drive past scenes that visitors take pictures of, and you don't see them at all. It's been good to be a tourist in my own home, and I hope I can keep the glasses around. Maybe I'll even notice the pile of junk mail and finally sort it out.
