Greenlake
It's inevitable that the boys and I will soon have to move; I'd intended to buy this place, but given my encumbrances with the IRS and my stubbornly immovable Portland house, making yet another towering structural purchase would unleash more financial minions than I feel like reckoning with. But I'll regret a move away from Greenlake, which has been a sanctuary of late. It's replaced the bathroom as my one inviolate sanctuary; the boys are bored with Greenlake and leave me alone to it.
How anyone could tire of Greenlake I am not sure, though, as it changes its surfaces with the seasons, and I would love it for its complex and ionic sky alone--a sky that opens wider and brighter by tenfold, folding clouds into striated ribbons of pink and endless tones of grey without the darkness that seems omnipresent everywhere else except the Seattle coastline proper. I am a little in love with the bleached birch trees, which stand in bamboo-like rectitude in winter, the bark as stark-white as the steam from your breath--or so it seems from a distance--but buttery white, or discolored--almost coffee-stained--upon closer inspection. The smooth bark like bone, the bleakness and also the stoic posture. I run past them but always relish them; they move me somehow. In the spring (and it is spring now), Greenlake explodes into soft, sexual blossom: pink and white cherry blossoms that burst open and drift indolently down on us joggers, and carpet our path underfoot. Upon the lower branches, as I run by at a blur, I see the occasional dropped hat, missing baby shoe, bib or cloth, draped visibly so it might be reunited with its owner. New plantings have been initiated, I noticed tonight, of simple, hardy flowers, in small patches within the outer loop. The outer loop is where more "serious" runners circle. Although I am not one of those. I merely wish to not have to leap dog leashes, park benches, or weave between two-abreast, double-wide strollers pushed by women with crisscrossed shih tzus on the more congested (and more bucolic) inner path. On spring days, I forgo the beauty of the lake's edge path and stick to the gravelly outer loop for its economy, and because it gives me more mileage with which to exorcise my daily demons. In the summer, and in fact even the winter and spring of what has been an unusually temperate year, I often run the path at night, which may be dangerous; I don't know (and I suppose I don't care as much as I should.) Lately I have opted not to play my usual workout mix, preferring to let my player choose a soundtrack, and the moon hangs always brightly and accessibly over the lake; it's as if it's always lit for company. One such night, Tom Waits' "Waltzing Mathilda" came on, as the moonlight fell loosely over the lifeguard tower before fracturing itself across the lake's chop, and that's when I learned that it's entirely possible to run with your heart at your throat.