I wonder if everyone else also thinks they live in the best part of the country? Seattle has clouds from mid-November through April. I don't mean partly cloudy, and I don't mean fluffy, cotton-candy cloudy....I mean gray-oppressive-depressing-deadening-gloom cloudy.But I still think I live in the best part of the U.S. Maybe it's just rationalizing, since I don't really have the option of living anywhere else. My autistic son, Kevin, is in a group home 20 minutes from my house...so I'll be staying in the NW.
But maybe it's just that we don't have winter snow and ice, and we don't have summer humidity or high temps, we don't have hurricanes, we don't have thunder & lightening storms, we don't have earthquakes and we don't have cockroaches! We do have a volcano or two, but they're generally well behaved....
Or maybe it's because it is beautiful. Took a drive with my dad recently on one of our last sunny days of the year. Never were we further than 8 miles from my home...and what a day of wondrous surprises we had...First we stumbled across, almost by accident, a new little park with a pier with amazing views. At the end of the pier we found a whole world of fisherman - a couple of dozen men of so many colors and nationalities all trying their best on a bright Sunday afternoon to nab a "keepable" King salmon at least 21 inches long. (we saw at least one succesful catch!)
A few minutes from the pier, we stopped in the parking lot of the old Cliffhouse restaurant just to take pictures of the breath-taking view of Mt. Rainier. Dad said he was hungry, but I told him the Cliffhouse was a fancy-shmancy place and we weren't dressed.
But Dad's 84, and he's sort of done with little rules like that, so he wandered toward the building anyway "just to check". Come to find out the Cliffhouse has a casual restaurant downstairs....with the same world class view! We had coffee and clam chowder and basked in Mt. Rainier and the Puget Sound.Our last surprise was a a mountain dressed in lilac pink frosting....
At least on this day, I think you can forgive Dad and me for believing we were lucky to live in the best the country has to offer....
1 comment:
Thank you, Sanford! It's pretty hard to take a bad picture of Rainier and the Sound.
You must have been in Seattle between November and May. It is tough going those months for all of us. In fact, Washington state has the country's second highest suicide rate after Alaska, and we have to assume it's the gloomy gray skies...
But boy, when the mountain comes out of hiding, it makes up for a lot...
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