My sister and her husband took an impromptu trip to Las Vegas and left the kids with grandma, grandpa and me. I drove up to Arlington to help grandma out, because these three young people are a 5.7 on the babysitting Richter scale. Angels one minute, and then next it’s a crying wailing slap fight over the last four yellow, square lego pieces. Or who gets to sit on the reclining patio furniture. Or who got more sauce for their McNuggets. You know the drill.

Cut to us, going to the river while grandma took grandpa to his bible study. We went to River Meadows park, on the Stillaguamish River. Everybody loved it! No fighting or crying! We stalked minnows, read books, and ate our picnic. Cody got onto a big rock and made it his boat. He and Greta pretended they were adrift in the ocean and had to eat whatever they caught. Annika caught a fish with her bare hands. She and I eventually got all the way into the water and floated downstream from the big rock to the clay shelf.

On our way back to the car, over rocks and sand and a wooded trail, Cody (three and a half) complained because everyone was walking too fast for him. He was wearing an older sister’s castoff flip-flops, too big for him, and he kept losing the right one. I asked if he would like to hold my hand. “That way, I can’t go too fast for you. Would that work?” To which he replied, “Hey, Auntie, you’re kid friendly!”

Leap, went my heart.

When we got home, I even got to carry his sleeping three-year-old body in from the car. There is nothing so nice as a quiet, sleeping small person clinging to your torso in utter trust. Sigh. An excellent day in Auntie Land.


I went for an hour-long walk in Arlington this morning. It’s not the Plame, Massachusetts of my recent dream, but it has the signs of a quiet hometown that’s prospering. There are two recently built elementary schools (replacing old buildings), and a new high school. The old high school building is now, predictably, being rented to a Christian school. It’s a new marketing trend, as far as I can tell. Happens all over.

There are cute old houses here, and plenty of 70’s plywood sided places, too. A few manufactured homes, but overall this is a place of solid stuff. Even the new sprawling condos, apartments and “which one is mine” houses on what used to be Jensen’s Farm look to be sturdy Northwest construction.

My favorite grocery chain, Haggen, has a store here. Like Vashon, the downtown boasts and old-timey hardware store, a feed store, a single-screen movie theater, a couple of ratty old bars, a trendy restaurant, a few banks, and funky stores.

I’ve always wanted to live in the woods, and up here I might actually be able to afford it. I would still need my parents to cosign, but the mortgage payment wouldn’t kill me each month. As onerous a duty as it is, I feel I need to offer my mother some help with my dad. He’s just not able to be left alone, and she is really close to losing it sometimes. She deserves a little time to herself.

There are affordable pieces of property upriver (‘upriver’ is the local equivalent to Vashon’s ‘overtown’) that have creeks on them. I know that I need to do this living in the woods thing in my 40’s, because I will need to do a lot of building, landscaping, repair or remodeling myself. Given that my back and my knee are already causing me the chronic pain I wasn’t looking forward to until about a decade and a half from now, I need to get on this plan. I see crushed gravel paths leading to a shingled, small cabin with native plants. I don’t intend to garden or plant much or do anything that requires too much alteration of what nature put there in the first place. Un-messed-around-with, I think the commercial calls it.

I have spent a lot of time worrying about what could be a potentially isolating decision. “What if I go upriver and I’m depressed and anxious because I don’t’ constantly have people around? What if I make this plan, get up there, and realize I’m no happier than where I was? What if I really miss everyone on the island and, and, . . . “ Well, Dorothy, here’s the deal: Kansas isn’t a where, it’s a construct, no? I will have the same propensity toward anxiety and discontent no matter where I go. So the real question is whether I should forego my dream of living in the woods out of fear of what I already feel most of the time, or just do it because I’m the same person inside no matter where I go. As Zanna used to say, “no matter where you go, there you are,” and it’s true.

The plan was already in place, the savings plan, the idea of what I want to look for. Now I just have to wait for time to elapse so I can have a little money and a little perspective. (Will I ever have perspective? Wait, of course I will. I do now. Silly teacher Elsa.)