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.
