Letting go of my dream life/part 2

It’s actually hard to grasp that it’s done. But it is!

Friday morning Trouble 2 and Audrey vacated my storage unit in Seattle. They brought the sack with the Tempure Pedic mattress and the three storage boxes to the room on 15th and Marion they are renting for their stay.

I had been preparing. Already a week ago I had digged out my Seattle note book. On the last page the list with everything I kept in Seattle.

This is one of my things. I need to prepare. I need to be as ready as I can be. This counts for difficult things as well as fun. But of course difficulties needs a higher level of preparation.

So, that first evening with the list in my Seattle note book I was reading every item. Slowly. Feeling them. The Kalaloch sweatshirt bought on our first stay at the lodge. The cereal bowl from my Boyer Avenue home. The multicolor thick beach blanket - how many afternoons in Gaswork Park? The grayish green knitted halter neck tank from the Fremont market, so special to me.The ice tea pitcher, brand new from my last stay telling I was planning on coming back many times. And so on. My itinerant Seattle home.

Swedes dress in light colors in the summer. We completely change our wardrobe in a way Seattleites don’t. Personally I love white. I’m a white lady. Complemented with pastels and some bright surprises.

Wearing those colors in Seattle makes you an exclamation mark in the beige/grey wardrobe of the Emerald City. I’ve always found it odd how bright the city is and how dimmed the inhabitants dress. But my home grown analyzes is that the nine months a year of wet and grey skies and ground sticks in the soul, reflecting the dress code.

The first years in Seattle I stuck to my Swedish summer colors. I was still a tourist. But as time went by I noticed myself picking up beige tanks at Nordstrom Brass Plum as well the finest latte shades of silk blends at Banana Republic. I was becoming a Seattleite. I wasn’t comfortable being an exclamation mark in my new home town any more.

The clothes I’ve been keeping in my storage have all been the Seattle palette. I wouldn’t even wear them in Sweden. It’s something about the quality of the summer light here that doesn’t work with fifty shades of beige.

Therefore, in this separation I was about to go through, I was thinking of giving away my favorite Seattle clothes. That’s what I was preparing for. Going through the list once more. But in the hours before the actual clean out this Friday I changed my mind. What if? What if I at some point will be able to return to Seattle one last time? And my Seattle clothes are gone. There is always that hope… No, I would have Trouble 2 and Audrey bring them back to Sweden, I would put them in a special box and just keep them.

At my 8PM I waived to Trouble 2 and Audrey over Skype. Hi there! Look at that downtown view from you window, wow! And then: okay, lets do this!

We sorted all my things in four piles: back to Sweden, throw away, Zoe and Becca - would they like this?, and keep in Seattle. Oh, yes, I forgot, my dearest Matt and Elizabeth had most kindly offered a corner somewhere in their Capitol Hill home to store my mattress!!

Trouble 2 is a quite slow and methodical young man, Audrey the exact opposite. Together we went through box after box. The U.S. domestic mail sack where I am keeping my mattress is a magical storage, this I know since before. And in the end “we” managed to squeeze in not only the blow dryer, electric tooth brush and the beach blanket, but also the top 5 of my Seattle summer wardrobe into the sack!

So this was successful indeed! Also, I did not go all emotional but went through this event cheery and without shedding a tear. I was quiet proud of myself I have to say.

I know for sure this would not have been possible without my mental preparation. Grieving my things in beforehand, so to speak. And of course not without Trouble 2 and Audrey’s good spirit, for which I am very grateful.

So, now I don’t have a storage in Seattle anymore. Check! And I feel lighter. But there is more to come…

Letting go of my dream life/part 1

It looks like the sun will be out in Seattle all week! I am happy for all Seattleites who have had the greyest and wettest winter (starting October) in history, but also for Trouble 2 and Audrey who arrived in Seattle some days ago and will stay through the month.

In 2007 I was planning on starting spending more time in Seattle. My sons were growing up and I was picturing myself in the beautiful Emerald City 2-3 months a year, although spread out in about three periods.

I definitely perceived this time as a turning point in my life. My marriage was over. Both my parents had passed away. My sons changing to young men moving in with their girlfriends. And my start up business feeling the air under it’s wings. This was my time coming up.

I knew exactly what I wanted. I remember sitting on the deck of the Bainbridge ferry one of those gorgeous sunny Seattle summer days feeling it right into my bones: this is where I want to be. This is where I should be. This is where I need to be. This is where I must be. This is where I’m meant to be! 

It wasn’t news to me, I had been in love with this gorgeous city ever since we stayed the year 1996-97. Drinking the Portage Bay view from our living room window and driving through Arboretum in the afternoons picking up my sons at school. So I had been waiting for and heading for this moment for ten years. As my sons’ father had left Sweden a couple of years earlier, it couldn’t be full time though, which was okay. Three months a year would do fine as a start. My heart and roots were in my little Swedish village. Seattle was my lungs and the wind in my hair.

I was pretty sure too the Seattle environment would be good soil for my business. Communicating with storytelling was brand new in Sweden at this time, and it’s a tough job to create both a product and a market. Even in Seattle I had to do a lot of explaining on what I was doing, but there was definitely a curiosity and a more matur market.

So, the plan was to find clients and assignments in Seattle. And to create an environment for myself where I could feel like a professional. I was very grateful to all my friends who had let me stay in their basements for a lot of commuting years, but I now desired my own place. I wanted to buy me a city condo with water view, in purpose of renting it when I wasn’t there myself. Now, that utopia stops right there as there was no way I could come up with that kind om money, but the idea was great as well as intriguing.

No, I had to start at a different end. And I did. I bought myself a car. That’s a story by itself, a good one, and I am saving it for a different post. Anyway, I now had my own car! Bliss! That’s the most adequate word for how I felt about that car. And about myself in that car. Driving in Seattle. My city. My car. A Dodge Stratus ES year 2000 with an electric roof window. Leather seats. Color, I would say latte. And driving it… I’ve had some car experiences in my life, but driving that car was pure joy.

Now, as I couldn’t purchase a home I had to find a solution for all my stuff. To start with, there was the Tempure Pedic mattress which my body is addicted to for sleeping. I keep it in an U.S. domestic mail sack. And then there was those special things I wanted to hold on too. My cereal bowl, my tea cup, fragments of my Boyer Avenue home. And all the items so unpractical dragging cross the ocean several times a year: blow drier, schampoo, electric tooth brush, lotions, bath robe, shoes, clothes… Over the years it’s added up to three good size storage boxes. Stored in friends basements. Oh, those friends…

I didn’t want to be a burden to them anymore. And the solution eventually became a storage unit on Martin Luther King Ave half way to SeaTac airport. I really liked the number on that unit. And the view of the new light rail from where the elevator was. It wasn’t a city condo with a water view but it was something. It was my something.

You know all those stories you hear about people changing their lives for the better? Being at a crossroad starting walking towards a goal. I always wonder how that happens. How a plan actually becomes a reality. Mission completed. Doesn’t life intervene? Put up hinders?

This was my crossroad. And I was determined. Absolutely sure I would live a part time Seattle life. Feeling it into my bones. Meant to be.

How wrong I was. First my back crashed, although temporarily I hoped. Then I got cancer. And then my back crashed for good. 

I have been back in Seattle. But only for vacation. I have been driving my car, but only briefly. And I have actually had the experience of city condos with water views. Amazing pent houses, although momentary homes for my cereal bowl and tea cup.

Trouble 2 and Audrey is driving my beloved car right now. But the Doge Stratus seems to have lost it’s former glory since I last drove it in 2012. And my storage unit has turned expensive over the years meanwhile the Swedish crona is not an asset towards the dollar anymore. So.

Now is the time. Trouble 2 and Audrey have promised me to clean out my storage as a favor to having access to a free car. And I am preparing to say goodbye to my never achieved goal and dream life. I’ve known for some years now that it is the only thing to do. It’s just so hard to let go.

A Washington Initiative for change

The experience was surreal. A sleepy Sunday on a Seattle Downtown escalator, surrounded by people wearing NRA badges. Related to what’s happened in Washington State these past weeks, the memory comes back.

On October 24 a teenage boy shot five other teenagers and then himself in the Marysville-Pilchuck Highschool cafeteria in Snohomish County about an hour north of Seattle. Today five of the children are dead, only one survived. No, they weren’t young men or women, they were 14 and 15 year old children, three girls and two boys. Now dead by a gun. The reason for the deeply tragic shooting including relatives and members of the Tulalip Tribe will probably never be clarified. Funerals and memorial services so far have gathered thousands. 

The U.S. Mid Term Elections were held November 4. As always in a U.S election the different states are also going to the ballots about state initiatives. Which means, you give your vote pro or con a proposition which only affects your state. For example, Washington and Colorado earlier voted for legalization of marijuana for recreational use. Oregon followed in this election.

Now, on November 4 the people of Washington State were offered to vote on five ballot measures, one of them was Initiative 594, concerning background checks for firearm sales and transfers. The initiative makes sure anyone buying a gun in Washington State passes the same background check, no matter where they buy the gun and no matter whom they buy it from.

So, what about the experience on the Seattle Downtown escalator?

Well, it was a Sunday, I think in 1997. I had left my family in our Boyer Avenue home and took the car to Convention Center which I did three times a week to get my workout at Gold’s Gym. I would guess Trouble & Trouble were sitting at the dining room table drawing or playing with their next door friends Carel and Nick. 

I parked in the Convention Center garage and took, as always, the escalator to the gym floor. Although the Convention Center is a very public place, it is often surprisingly quiet. Not this Sunday though. A lot of people, a lot of badges. A lot of pins. I glanced at the messages. And remembered. This was the weekend for the National Rifle Association convention. I was surrounded by people who’s opinion was owning guns is more or less a human right.

Sensing the situation now I feel like I wanted to make myself as little as possible. Invisible. I was scared. I was surrounded by a culture so foreign to me I felt like I had landed on a different planet with evil aliens. Or being an extra in the escalator scene of a violent thriller.

What made the scene even more unreal was the fact there weren’t only men on the set. There were women. There were families. There were children. Children the same age as Trouble & Trouble momentary drawing at the dining room table on a slow Sunday afternoon. Children wearing pins saying “Don’t touch my gun”. It was surreal.

I feel now like that scene was in slow motion. I was at my step of the escalator standing as still as possible. Looking straight forward, glancing at the pins from the corner of my eye. Like, as if I didn’t move I wouldn’t stir the situation up and make it explosive.

Now, on November 4 Washington State voted yes on Initiative 594 and became the first state in the U.S. to close the background checks loophole by popular vote. 594 extends the currently used criminal and public safety background checks by licensed dealers to cover all firearm sales and transfers, including gun show and online sales, with reasonable exceptions. This is something to celebrate!

Some say this won’t change anything. If you want a gun you will get yourself a gun. And I’m sure that’s true. But it’s a start. It won’t bring Andrew, Nate, Zoe, Gia, Shaylee and Jaylen in Marysville back to life. And there will be more shootings, in schools, and elsewhere. But the people of Washington has made a strong mark. As the first state in the U.S. they want a change for the future.

The ramps to nowhere - the story of a legendary citizen uprising

I drove through Arboretum most every day. It was my afternoon treat when picking up Trouble & Trouble at Valley School in Madison Valley on the edge of Central District. Being embraced by the greenery on the winding Lake Washington Boulevard on my way down there, then one more time on my way back. I loved it, I just loved it. And knowing there might have been a freeway instead of the Japanese Garden, made the drive even more precious.

First time I saw them was 1993 when we stayed in Juanita, Kirkland, east of Lake Washington for three months. Passing the lake on the 520 bridge they are on your right side driving from Seattle. The Seattle ramps to nowhere. It was our friend Harold, Trouble & Trouble’s American grandpa telling us the story.

In the 1960s there were far advanced plans for a north-south freeway, the four-lane R.H. Thomson Expressway to parallel I-5. It would have run through the Arboretum, mostly destroying it, and then south along what is now Martin Luther King Jr. Way. But the legendary citizen uprising in the late 60s and early 70s ruined those plans and that’s why Arboretum is still one of Seattle’s green lungs!

Although, there is the ramps.

The freeway project was so far gone some parts of it was already built. Like parts of the ramps leading from the 520 bridge over the water and into the Arboretum in the Montlake neighborhood. But right in the middle of those ramps, the R.H. Thomson Expressway was killed off in a 71 percent vote of the city after a 10-year battle. And since then the cut off ramps over the water nature preserve has been a ruin telling the story of  the power of citizen uprising.

Until now. Because this week the work taking down those ramps started. So is everyone happy now? Of course not!

In unofficial Seattle, there’s more sadness than joy. In fact there has been a drive to try to save the ramps — pushed by some of the same activists who fought them being built more than 50 years ago!

- “I still can’t quite believe they’re coming down,” says Anna Rudd, 74, who was in her 20s when she  helped make sure the ramps would never lead anywhere. 

When Rudd went to community groups to drum up support for saving the ramps, she was amazed how almost everyone had a ramp-jumping story. There’s a whole secret society in Seattle Anna Rudd found out. Generations of kids would ride their bikes down to the ramps to jump off, then not tell their parents about it until they became adults. Countless UW students jumped. The whole Garfield football team used to jump. It turns out it’s a Seattle rite of passage. Also popular was sunbathing, stargazing and frat-hazing rituals. The homeless used the ramps for shelter, lovers to canoe beneath.

But the ramps are coming down. The new 520 bridge over Lake Washington is wider, now in process and progress, and the Arboretum folks want their preserve back. The activists who blocked the expressway now quixotically hope to save pieces of the ramps for a monument.

- These aren’t just ramps, Anna Rudd said. “They’re literally a concrete example of how citizens can gather together and choose their own destiny. 51 years ago, they were an embarrassing mistake. Yet over time they became a real place, wriggling into the life of the city until they turned into the most unlikely objects of Seattle pride".

The cut off road on giant concrete pillars are symbols of hubris. Or maybe the ramps show that you can beat City Hall. Either way it was on those ramps that the ethic of progress at all costs gave way to the everyone-gets-a-say process that so defines Seattle politics today.

I am trying to think of a similar example in Umeå. As the Umeå politics is defined by the same everyone-gets-a-say process I’m sure there is one but from the top of my head I can’t come up with an example. 

I am thinking though about the new public indoor pool that’s under construction in Downtown Umeå. I haven’t heard of one single person who wants it there. We need a new great public indoor pool, yes, but there are several other spots to place it than right in the middle of the city center. This was the only spot the Umeå politicians could agree on though. What had happened if the Umeå citizens would have had a vote on it? If we would vote now, in the middle of the construction? It’s an interesting thought.

Trouble & Trouble and I used to watch the 520 bridge through the panorama window in our home on Boyer Avenue. I still love driving through Arboretum, and since my chiropractor and dear friend Randi has her office on Madison in the valley I have had many reasons to take that route and enjoy the winding greenery. Will I miss the ramps? Well I don’t have a personal connection to them other than they being a part of the Seattle history. And in that sense they are important. Even to me.

Ship ahoy!

Oh how I loved being in Seattle during the Holiday Season! Just loved it!!

The Christmas tree lighting ceremony at Westlake Mall! The lit up Downtown, crazy with Christmas shoppers! The ferries filled with dressed up people going to Christmas parties! The neighborhoods competing about the most insane over-the-top light displays! But most of all I love the Christmas Ships!

For many years I made sure getting my dosage of Seattle Holidays. I packed my bags in December with an assignment of a story for Swedish National Radio or Television as an excuse and headed over for a week-ten days in a rainy city making the lights even more vibrant in the reflecting puddles.

I shot Seattle Men’s Chorus in Beneroya Hall and the Dreamliner Virtual Rollout, I reported about the different ingredients of the American Holidays and about The Washington Software Alliance. I told the story of the Cool House, the new city public library and I interviewed the author Russel Banks on a Seattle December visit. I also spent days sitting at the Blackbird Bakery on Bainbridge Island working on the texts for my photo show Away is Home, Home is Away. A couple of times the visit was postponed to right after Christmas, making me spend New Years in the Emerald City!

The Holiday memory I treasure the most though is the year we stayed in Seattle. Cause there can’t be any better place for a Holiday experience than Portage Bay overlooking the Montlake Cut!

Our place for the year was a small house that didn’t look like much from the outside, but was such a wonderful little home for my family. It was on Boyer Avenue about five blocks from University Bridge, and Portage Bay was the best entertainment all year round. I used to have my afternoon tea lying in my cushy cream colored love seat watching whatever was going on down on the bay through my big panorama window. I never got tired of that view! All those boats in different shapes and sizes! Trouble & Trouble and I had our different Argosy cruise ships favorites. Come to think of it, Trouble 2 and I actually agreed on the same preference.

This weekend is the opening for the Christmas Ships in Seattle. And I know exactly what Portage Bay looks like this evening! A parade of lit up, dressed up, spruced up boats glittering and glimmering in the dark night! And some of them have music, choirs singing on the black water!

Trouble 2 and I could sit for hours watching the floating lights waiting for our ship. Here it comes, there it is! Let’s just sit here forever and enjoy this! Oh how I miss that! And where did that little boy go?

Actually, he and Audrey are down in my kitchen making dinner for us. He is right here. In the woods at the end of the road. The opposite to Portage bay. No water for ships to sail on. I am doing what I can to lit up the dark though. Strings of lights in my maples guarding my gate. Light curtains from the roof of my front porch. Spotlights shooting up my dad’s ash tree down in the corner and the big pine next to the field.

There is one ship though! My grandfather’s old apple tree is lit up with spotlights and along the round wooden deck underneath sits a string of lights. Another string is attached to the rope tied around the stem at the crown of the tree and anchored in the ground some feet away in the lawn. That device actually looks like a backstay and in the summer I even connect a light piece of fabric to it, which makes you think of a sail.

It’s been snowing today. In the snow there is a lit up apple tree that in wintertime looks like a space ship. No, I don’t have any waters. And there are no ships sailing here. I might be able to arrange some singing though. On my space ship in the woods at the end of the road.