The Sense of Home

[akirlu]

As we crested a hill southeast of downtown some weird trick of perspective made the Olympics tower almost unfathomably tall and blue and snowy and remote above the crest, just before we reached it. "God, I love living here," I said, almost without volition. "I was just thinking the same thing," Hal replied.

We, my friends, are home.

We walked Sarah around Seward Park Sunday evening. The 2.5 mile path skirts the edge of Lake Washington all around the little peninsula. The verges are a wild, unmown tangle that brushes against my calves, and the water comes chuckling and clucking up against the shore whenever a boat wake chases itself to land. The evening was warm enough for shorts and sandals, and the westering light was still northerly bright and high as we walked. The water lily pads are just beginning to come back in the swimming lagoons, only as big as demi-tasse saucers, yet. The lawns are confettied with the tiny white daisies for making chains of, and scattered here and there, old black men and young Hispanic families are settled with their fishing poles out and their feet in the water. A little girl laughs at herself in the middle of the path, having run right out of her own sandal. A small group gathers, talking and fishing, out on one of the floating docks, but the diving platform yonder floats unattended, waiting for warmer waters. The air grows thick with unnameable flowers, the shrubs are white clouds in the green. Often the conifers stand hard against the shore, leaning out to shade the water coppery beneath them. There are spartan wooden benches here and there, tucked away in private places where it would be good to sit with a lunch, or a book, or just the will to watch the lake. The hardwoods are near full leaf now, though the canopy hasn't closed in yet. The leaves are still acid bright, single, individual stars in a constellation. We talk as we walk, and Sarah is as almost-good as she can be. Everything sounds of happy families at the lake shore. Everything smells of forest and grass and lake water, scents that pierce right into the deepest part of memory. This is what home is like. This is what summer is like.

Rounding the final curve, we find that we have missed the end of the usual pottery sale sponsored by the teaching studio there. A Subaru is packed with boxes of stoneware to go back to someone's home. A spare woman passes us, almost, and turns and asks, "Do you want these cups? The glaze crawled, but if you want them, they're yours." I want them. She hands me a mixed trio of Japanese-style stoneware teacups. Decent journey work, no two quite alike, with a marvelous metallic-sheened russetty trout-spotted glaze. Inside, the glaze has crawled into shapes like alien glyphs of white on the rust-colored clay. I thank her, and make Hal carry the cups, because I have the dog. I love serendipity. I may re-gift the cups later - we have so many cups - but in that moment I love them, they are perfect, and this is what it's like to be home.

Comments

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm homesick now. That's a perfect description of Seward Park and Seattle in general on an early summer day.