Safe and Sound

I’ve just gotten back up the hill from my friend Jeff’s beach. He had a full kayaking trip today, so I couldn’t go with. That was actually kind of fine with me. I spent most of the afternoon with a trashy fashion magazine. However, realizing that I had to do SOMETHING, I took his dog Braxton down to the beach to spend a little quiet time with myself, just like the Dalai Lama says we all should.

I’m still in a little bit of recovery mode, which is a statement that my brother Daniel scoffs at. But I am! We left early Thursday morning on schedule and arrived at Jeff’s house on the island at 11:45 on Friday night. In case you’re counting, that’s over 2,000 miles in two days. My brother is awesome: he drove most of the time, kept us on track when I would have dawdled and asked me if I was OK whenever I got too quiet and cried.

We drove through Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana and Idaho on our way to Washington. We pretty much stayed on I-90 or I-94 the whole way. North Dakota was gorgeous with straw yellow field and cornflower blue skies and big clouds with flat bottoms that looked 3D, rather than the usual painted backdrop. My mother was born in Dickinson (we drove through) and spent happy childhood summers there and I like seeing that it’s beautiful, too. In a beautiful rest-stop in Montana, we saw a fully bowed rainbow behind us. A new covenant.

Yesterday, all three of us drove down to Seattle and spent the day exploring there. We wandered around to find the U-district, which was OK, but ultimately found the Fremont neighborhood, which showed signs of gentrification, but had all sorts of cutey little shops that I wanted to look in but the boys had no interest in. When we walked around the Fremont market, I didn’t give them a choice: I just stopped. :-) It didn’t seem to matter if I told them I was stopping or not, they figured that I wasn’t there eventually. One vintage clothing vendor told Daniel that he would sell the shirt that he was wearing (Guns and Roses concert tee) for $75 if he had it. Glam Dan’s got style and he knows it. :-)

Ultimately, we walked around Pike’s Place market at the end of the day. Lots of the shops in that area are full of overpriced used stuff and buy-and-sell jewelry or trinkets made by child labor in some third-world sweatshop. Ugh. However, just on our way out was a little stand by the flowers of these wonderful little creatures that were only half an inch to 3 inches big. Totally fantastic and completely the product of this artist’s imagination. I love buying things from the actual people that made them! So, I found this little goofer guy with big ears that I’ll hang from the bathroom ceiling when I get an apartment. Overall, a successful trip to the big city before I abandon civilization for awhile.