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Author: Anne Cassidy

Waterfront Walk

Waterfront Walk

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The Seattle waterfront is a boisterous place. You can almost imagine early settlers here, lumberjacks and Gold Rush guys — such is the energy of the ferries and buskers and tourists and water taxis. 

There was a pier you could walk on to be more at one with the water and the waves. The guy sitting at the end of it yelled down to me. “How big do you think that fishing boat is? I think about 40, 50 feet,” he said. I said yes, having absolutely no reason to disagree with him. 

I wanted to move beyond all of this, though, to a place where water met land. So I kept walking north, toward Alaska (as the sign said), to the Olympic Sculpture Garden and a little cove where driftwood and drifters gathered. I could have walked all day, but I had a train to catch. 

Path Not Taken

Path Not Taken

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No long hikes yesterday, but several walks around the neighborhood. I explored the Cathedral of St. James, a local bookstore, the leafy streets around this hotel and a college campus with green paths and rhododendrons tall as trees. 

It’s hard to say which kind of day I like better, the long-hike ones or the short-foray ones. The first is the sweeping overview, the second a drilling down, an immersion in the particular, like finding a good cafe for take-out hot tea that is not Starbucks.

The kind of day I had yesterday makes me think about what it would be like to live here, to be part of the rhythms and moods of this place. It’s something I do whenever I travel, a creative exercise, pondering the path not taken.

Lake Union Walk

Lake Union Walk

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Lake Union is a freshwater lake contained entirely within the city limits of Seattle. It’s a port, a neighborhood and a playground — and we walked all the way around it yesterday.

We trekked from Westlake to Eastlake, from the Center for Wooden Boats to Gas Works Park. We crossed the Fremont Bridge and the University Bridge. We sometimes wandered off course, but always found our way back again.

The trail was a visual feast, with skyline city views, en plein air artists capturing the gas works in watercolor, boats stacked on boats, floating homes tucked away in private coves, roses blooming in pocket-handkerchief-sized gardens, even a goose and goslings. 

Yes, the feet are a little sore this morning, but what a way to see the city!

The Views

The Views

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A long walk, a steep climb, and then, at the top …  a reward — the city spread out below: Lake Union to the left, downtown straight ahead and the Space Needle to the right. 

Lovely views have benefits beyond their beauty. They orient us to a place, show us how the pieces fit together. They bind the parts into the whole.  

Later, on the downhill return trip, when the way forward seemed crooked and confusing, I thought about the order revealed at the summit. That — and the map! — got us home.

Bluest Skies

Bluest Skies

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My house does the funniest thing when it knows it’s about to be left behind for a few days. It takes on a rosy glow that makes it hard for me to leave. It’s done this for years now, long enough that I’m wise to its wiles. The only way around this is to put myself on auto-pilot, to clean, gather and pack, so that when the taxi arrives, I can walk out the door knowing the house and dog are taken care and we can escape.

This time, it’s to Seattle, just minutes away from Celia and Matt’s place. The city rolled out the red carpet over the weekend, giving us “the bluest skies you’ll ever see” — which, unlike in this spoof of the old song, really were cloudless and azure.

Today it’s a return to the more typical gray firmament— but the city beckons as it always does, with its lush foliage, bustling market and funky vibe that is such a welcome contrast to the button-down culture of the “other Washington,” the one I left just two days ago.

A Trip West

A Trip West

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It’s a big country, a fact I learned from the back seat of a station wagon when I was a kid. To land somewhere exciting, you packed your things, climbed into the car and watched the miles tick away. Only 45 more till Joplin, 62 more till Tucumcari and, after what seemed like an eternity but was only four days, we reached San Bernardino, California. 

 The fact that we’d driven there didn’t make it any less exotic. In fact, I always marveled that by simply sticking with it — by putting in the miles, so to speak — we could make our way to a completely new place with orange groves and movie stars and the big blue Pacific lapping at the land. 

How different it will be tomorrow, when we wake up, taxi to Dulles and fly to the other side of the country — not just the horizontal other but the diagonal other, the Pacific Northwest — in all of five hours.

It will be none the less exotic for us having arrived there on a big silver bird. There will be dark firs and steep hills and that same big blue Pacific. But the amazement I feel being on the other side of the country will harken back to those early trips, to those interminable but (come to find out) essential drives through dessert and plain. They taught me a lesson I’ll never forget.

Look Out, Doris Lessing

Look Out, Doris Lessing

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Week before last, when I left the still pool of full-time employment for the more turbulent waters of freelance writing, I was given a golden pen and notebook. (Thank you, Drew!) 

The golden pen I pressed into service immediately, finding in its slim contour and smooth passage on the page a near-perfect writing implement. I’ve already used it to scribble in my journal on Day One, and it’s now sitting on my desk in a place of honor, the little crystal pineapple on its top harkening back to a many-faceted ornament a friend gave me when I set off to journalism school many years ago.

But the golden notebook is daunting. Should I reserve it for days when I feel the muse is calling with greater insistence? Should it be only for Very Important Writing or become one in a series of notebooks that are otherwise black and pedestrian?

Could I, like Doris Lessing, use it to tie together the disparate threads of my life? Unlikely. I haven’t even read Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. 

For now, the golden notebook will remain open to possibility, which is, I’m finding, a very nice way to be.

(Yesterday I discovered that the golden pen makes rainbows on the page when held outside at the proper angle.)

Luck of the Irish

Luck of the Irish

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Most people assume my Irish roots come from Dad’s side of the family. Something about the last name of Cassidy tips them off, I guess! But Dad’s family has been in Kentucky for generations, perhaps since the Revolutionary War, and he always seemed surprised when someone thought he hailed from the auld sod. 

Mom was the Irish one. She was proud of her lineage and traced her Concannon, Scott, Long and Hughes roots back to Counties Clare and Galway. She made us wear little green shamrocks made of green pipe-cleaners every March 17, back when it wasn’t cool to be green.

But it’s Dad I want to write about this morning. He would be 98 today, so I’ve been thinking about him and his way of looking at the world. 

Dad was an optimist and an extrovert who took joy in ordinary pleasures: his first cup of coffee in the morning (“ah, Brazilian novocaine,” he would say), a bowl of popcorn after dinner, his wife and children and grandchildren, whom he adored. 

He never tired of telling us how lucky he was to be our father, a compliment I threw right back at him as I grew older and (sort of) wiser. But he was lucky in the way that many of his generation were: tried and tested by early hardship and provided with free college, a low-cost mortgage and a trip to Europe aboard the Queen Elizabeth courtesy of Uncle Sam (though he had to fly 35 missions in a B-17 bomber to pay for it).

Most of all, though, he made his own luck. When the tough times came, which they did, Dad just plowed through them. Gratitude came easily to him. Luck, too. Whether it was from being “Irish” or just from being Dad, I’ll never know.

Margaret’s Garden

Margaret’s Garden

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Years ago, there was an iris and day lily farm a few miles from here. Gardeners would flock to the farm this time of year to enjoy the blossoms and perhaps buy a few bulbs, which would be delivered weeks later in a brown paper bag. 

Margaret Thomas was the gardener. She was a relic of the old days, of small farms and neighborliness. She lived in a green house with a picturesque shed out back, half falling down. Artists would set up their easels in her garden and paint the iris with the ruined shed in the background. 

Our Siberian iris come from Margaret, and though they share the garden with their showier cousins, they are the ones that catch my eye every spring, their delicate beauty I seek when winter’s done. 

As for Margaret’s garden, it’s now a subdivision: Iris Hills. 

The Spa Treatment

The Spa Treatment

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I’m trying not to make too much of the fact that although there are three mothers now in my immediate family, the only creature who had a spa treatment on Mother’s Day was Copper the dog, who not only is not a mother but was most likely never a father either.

Granted, it was not exactly a long languorous soak in the tub followed by a mani-pedi and massage. It was a trying hour in a van in our driveway during which he almost hyperventilated. 

The groomer finally gave up without trimming his ears and neck, but she got much further than last year’s groomer, who cut short Copper’s appointment, told us never to come back, and left our nervous canine with a funny patchwork trim he’s been growing out all year. 

“Most of the dogs I see have already been banned from PetsMart,” this year’s groomer said. 

How did she know?