Last night I did something out of character. I went out to be unsocial. I spent over an hour in Seattle rush hour traffic (alone) so I could sit in a room full of people I didn’t know, and not talk to them. Once a month Seattle has a Silent Reading Night at the Sorrento Hotel. Gobs of Seattle-style people cram into a beautiful, old-style hotel parlor and just sit there, drinking wine and not talking at all. Wait staff dressed in black quietly make hand and face gestures to patrons from across the room, then deliver their order. A harpist fills the would-be awkward silence with beautiful, unobtrusive, waves of glorious sound. The harpist happens to be my friend, which is part of the reason I was there.
When I first thought about this event, it occurred to me that part of the draw was this: When I lived in the Midwest, before I moved out here, and used to watch Frasier, this is exactly the way I envisioned Seattle to be. High-society, sophisticated, city-ish, and just a bit odd. So there it is. Fifteen years after moving to Seattle, I got the “Frasier effect” I was looking for.
Naturally, I love this sort of departure from my normal routine because I know it fires new synapses in the not-so-young brain. And it often triggers creativity for me as well. So I left the elegant boutique hotel and wandered in the First Hill neighborhood. While I am able to navigate downtown without too much problem, I am still mostly lost anywhere east of I-5. And I aim to fix that, so I spent six blocks walking the two blocks back to my car.
Then something completely unexpected happened. It felt like home: comfortable in sight and fragrance and feeling. It felt like my own neighborhood back in Minneapolis. The realization hit me so strongly that I stopped walking, and stood right in the middle of Madison street for a moment. Then I figured out what it was.
Pale yellow seedlings were floating from above, landing gently everywhere. Elm tree seeds. I looked up and there it was, a perfect elm tree from my past. We had one of these giant deciduous beauties in my back yard where I grew up. It yielded piles of leaves to jump in every fall, and shade from hot summer days, and occasionally it would yield green, 4-inch caterpillars that would turn into hand-sized
cecropia moths.
Then, in about 1979, Dutch Elm disease ripped through Minneapolis. I remember how sad it was when our neighbor’s tree was branded with bright orange paint, signaling the arbor team to chop it. Every elm in the neighborhood was eventually taken, one by one, and within a year the giant fixture of my childhood backyard was gone. A mulberry bush grew from the stump a few years later, and elm trees became a memory.
All of this occurred to me in a single moment last night at dusk, when I saw piles of the seeds gathered in gutters, on car windshields and around the bases of the elms that made them. I was happy to stand under that one tree, but I noticed it was just the first in a two-block row of old elms. So I walked along the whole block, stopping to take photos, and grab a hand full of the crunchy seeds and throw them like a kid throwing maple helicopters.
Those of you who live on First Hill are allowed to think me completely clinical, but Seattle is not flush with deciduous trees. Especially compared to the Midwest. Yes, we have alder and maple and the occasional ash, (God forbid we forget what raking is) but we’re the Emerald City because of our lush, giant, plentiful evergreens. In fifteen years, I’ve never seen an elm tree here. Not a 40-year old one, in seed like this, anyway. Not one that shouted out to me like this.
So I let it feel like home while I wandered. But that wasn’t all there was to it. The church across the street felt very familiar, too. I grew up in a Polish Ukranian neighborhood where most of the houses were built about 1912. Not a lot of stuff, especially on Seattle’s east side, is that old. We get a little excited about a church built in the 50s where I live now. But I looked at the bricks and the style and decided that maybe this one could have been build in about 1912, like the house I grew up in and the churches around it.
And then I ran across this and snapped a photo while giggling to myself. (Yeah, it tickles when I’m right sometimes.) Then I walked around the church to see more. The courtyard invited me in, so I went there, too.
Elm trees lined all four sides of the church block, but there were none in the courtyard, so I left and went back to the tree-surrounded exterior.
Then, with the last of the twilight fading, I went home. But not before throwing one more hand full of seeds into the air.
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