Letting go of my dream life/part 3

I often wonder how my stars were lined up during those commuting years to Seattle.

I packed my bags in Sweden with my DAT tape recorder and my Sony PD 150 video camera. Sometimes I had stories arranged at my arrival, but often times there were only ideas or not even that. I left Umeå where most everything was a struggle and landed in Seattle. Breathing in that moist red ceder, felt my lungs expand with possibilities and life running through my veins. It was a transformation I experienced 2-3 times a year for about 15 years.

At that time I was a public service journalist, freelancing for Swedish National Radio and Television. My field was vast and I could find stories most anywhere. And did so! Those were years when I just happened to be at the right place at the right time, as the expression goes. Things worked out for me in a way they never had before, and never would in the future. Stories and people just fell right into my lap!

The examples are countless. Like when I was doing a radio piece about the book circle If All of Seattle Read the Same Book. That month Seattle read The Sweat Hereafter by Russel Banks. And the City librarian asked me if I perhaps wanted to interview the author, he would fly in tomorrow? Yes Please!

Or that time when I was planning a TV story for the local news in Umeå about a tiny company in the small town Bjurholm, who produced and delivered the device that would lift the engine for the new Boeing Dreamliner into place, and my arrival in Seattle was timed up with the virtual roll out of the Dreamliner! I was the only woman in the line of many men from all over the world on the huge camera podium at the Everett Boeing Factory on that historic December morning 2006. 

This might be my favorite: I happened to be in Seattle when the last episode of Seinfeld was on air. I watched it at a full Paramount Theatre house, an event called the Sein Off. Right after I walked the four blocks to the hotel I called home for many years, doing a live report in a Swedish National Radio morning show. And by the way, Frank Sinatra died a couple of hours later so then I reported that as well.

And how do you like this? There was something really big happening at Microsoft in 1998 and I needed to get in contact with someone crucial at the company. That week, at my friends Terry and Doug’s kitchen table I met Jeff who handed me over a piece of paper with a name. Call this woman, we were in the same class for our MBA, say hello from me, she is best friends with Melinda Gates. 

I am not kidding, this is how it was! Back in Umeå I fought so hard to make things work in every aspect of my life and my heart was constantly heavy. In Seattle I felt like the whole city was welcoming me, there was a flow and I was surfing effortless on the waves moving my way.  No wonder I felt Seattle was my place on earth. This is where I am meant to be, how could it not be?!

I am remembered of my Seattle flow this week, the week of the Twin Peaks season 3 premiere. As the home of the series is Snoqualmie and North Bend 45 minutes northeast of Seattle, the occasion is of course a big thing in the area. My sons were way too young in the beginning of the nineties when Twin Peaks was on air, but they have watched the series later. And our visits to Snoqualmie Falls and Twedes (the RR Diner) have been many.

So the fact that Trouble 2 and Audrey booked a room at Salish Lodge (the Great Northern) and was a part of the event there for episode 1 of Twin Peaks season 3 was just right. And my heart started pounding… I would have gotten both radio and TV stories out of that! Being at the right place at the right time! But I am glad Trouble 2 and Audrey were. And for their own pleasure.

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.