It's been a hectic couple of weeks. My daughter started school, my youngest son started vocational school, I started a part time job that involves me actually having to sleep Saturday night so I'll be intelligent Sunday morning, and the crazy Seattle weather is driving me crazy.
I love my deck and the trees, sitting out there in the late afternoon breeze and watching the clouds drift by is a quiet pleasure. I think I've been tree deprived. Virginia Beach suffers from a scorched earth policy and just the thought of a home or five hundred going in creates a mile of bull-dozed land with all the redemptive quality of the Bonneville salt flats.
The houses going up on the ever shifting VB greenline are sprawling monstrosities that take up way too much space, but then I moved to Seattle, and Seattle is weird. At one time there must have been some serious eco-minded developers. Even the cheaper houses have a little land around them and trees so tall they must have been growing for hundreds of years. The older subdivisions from the nineties are big swaths of green. The newer ones--not so much. I thought I'd seen it all when it came to greedy developers, but newer subdivisions are even down-scaling the roads.
Over in Snoqualmie Ridge, one of the fancy new subdivisions, the roads are barely wide enough for two cars to pass and the houses take up every inch of available space. It's all well and good to super-size your house, but if you and your neighbor have bathrooms on corresponding walls and you can pop the screen to pass toilet paper, you're too close.
My subdivision, with its old trees, greenbelts and roads big enough to allow parking for households with more than two cars is great. I'm trying to enjoy it while I think of where I'll go next. Sooner or later, we'll all split up and go our separate ways. My kids have been really good about helping me out over the last year, and in turn I did the mom-thing, forcing them out of their ruts so they'd go back to school for living-wage jobs. Not that my oldest son needs help, but I thought it'd be nice if he made at least double what he's making now.
It hurts, God knows--having the three of us back in school isn't comfortable, but the future comes whether we like it or not, and one day? It's going to pay off.
2 comments:
Lol regarding super-sized homes; I know just what you mean. And we looked into moving to southern Illinois several years ago, but at that point I realized I'm really an Oregonian. I'd have missed everything growing around the houses, even blackberry vines. Back East the yards are so uncluttered, they seemed naked to me.
Hope the school and working stuff goes all right.
thanks you, Deanna. You know? I like the blackberry vines too. They grow on the trees around my yard and right now the fruit is still big and ripe. To an Easterner, they're beautiful.
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