My Love-Hate Relationship with Ferries

Sometimes I find myself looking out my kitchen window and just staring. I know how tall the evergreens are, but they still astonish me.

There aren't many bridges between the Olympic Peninsula and the greater Seattle-Tacoma area. We take the ferry a lot. We carry around the ferry schedule, make lunch plans with Caitlin or DON'T make lunch plans based on whether we can make the ferry schedule work around doctor's appointments, kids' naps, and everything else that goes into a normal day. It took me only about two weeks to hate the ferry.

It took only a little longer to start falling in love with the peninsula. When I want to see Caitlin, I hate the ferry. but I love the distance that the ferries put between this wild place and civilization.

I've never gotten so close to birds and squirrels before. They seem to think I'm just another animal that belongs here. Mike tried to chase away a young deer standing about ten feet away, and it finally sauntered away, with the insolence of a teenager being ordered out of the mall. People talk about black bears, cougars, and coyotes, but I haven't seen any. I haven't even seen a raccoon.

Downtown Seattle is a little over an hour away, but here it is wild.


        

Gray Sunday

It rained this morning. A faithful walker went by, wearing a rain poncho, with her two Golden Retrievers, who were NOT wearing ponchos. After the rain, the bay was the color of obsidian, under a fluffy gray sky. That may sound like a silly description, but there is a texture to the cloud cover I don't remember seeing in Missouri.

We went to Sequim Bible Church for the third time. We went two weeks ago, but missed last week because we were with Chris and Caitlin at Caitlin's church in Edmonds. Chris and LaChanda have returned safely to Luang Prabang, Laos.

Sequim Bible Church has a traditional service at 9:15 and contemporary service at 10:30--same preaching, but they sing a few hymns in the earlier one, using guitars. We tried both; the music didn't seem that different between the two, but in the first service we were the youngest people, and in the second we are among the oldest. We also met a number of new people in that group. We'll stick to the contemporary service. I love the old hymns, but I like to hear them accompanied by a pipe organ, or at least a piano.

An insert in the bulletin talked about the church around the world. There was a report on Christians in southern Laos. In the village of Khamnonsung, a church of some 700 believers was shut down on Good Friday of this year. They were told they could no longer meet in the church building that had been erected in 1963. I've never been worried for Chris and Chanda before, but now I'm wondering if I should be. Some Christians that they work with were arrested this summer while trekking in a rural area, and detained until they signed a false statement that they were traveling without their passports.

   I'm still surrounded by piles still needing to be sorted and put away, but it's starting to feel like home. 

Settling in with the Wildlife

Our first month wasn't much different from Missouri: living with company, among unpacked boxes, but a wonderful time with loved ones. Now we start living here.

There is a wildness on the peninsula that has caught me by surprise. Animals don't seem threatened by the presence of humans; we're just a curiosity to them. The humans here are a curiosity to me, too...

The first day we were here we saw mule deer, a mother with spotted twin fawns. They looked at us with mild surprise, and then danced off into the clearing across the highway, floating through the air as I had never seen except in Disney cartoons. Since we have been here, the twins have lost their spots. One is getting bigger than the other; it must be a male.

Brazen little red squirrels found my bird feeder. When I went out on the kitchen porch this morning, the birds scattered, but the squirrels continued to eat. I don't mind, as long as they stay on the ground and don't tear up my feeder.

The first bird to find the feeder, the same day I put it up, was a goldfinch. He was eating thistle seeds on the hill just beyond it. By the end of the day, a whole flock of them had come. Goldfinches are abundant here in the summer, an online guide says, but they migrate south in the winter. We'll see if an abundant source of sunflower seeds will entice them to stay.

My bird book has yet to appear in any of the unpacked book boxes, so I'm winging it on the western birds new to me. I know the finches, sparrows and nuthatches; Steller's jay and tanagers were easy to identify. No cardinals! I miss them.

Moving

From the ridiculous to the sublime.

We’ve lived in this house since 1985. Moving that much living, from Missouri to Washington State, would be daunting, even if my husband and I weren’t certifiable hoarders.

Husband: “I found more of your books. Why do you have so many books?”

Wife:  “After I sold a few books in our first garage sale, you told me it was a bad idea to sell books. So I have every remaining book I’ve ever owned, including that set of encyclopedias I bought at the library sale, that they gave me for five dollars if I would also take the children’s set and the yearbooks. Besides, what are my few hundred books compared to your thousands?”

But in the middle of the ridiculous, I found a bit of the sublime: an article written about my son in the school newspaper when he was a sophomore in high school. He talked about our family’s experience of living in England for a semester which whetted his appetite for travel. My geographer husband loves to travel, too, and for a while he and Chris had a running competition about who had been in more countries. But Mike gave up years ago, because he can never catch up to Chris. After our European family trip, there were Canada and Mexico, then he joined engineering ministries international, and started traveling the globe:  two years in India, and trips to Africa, Central America, and Southeast Asia.

“Roark strives for the limits,” says the headline. “I don’t like being normal,” he told the interviewer. He’s now living in Laos, teaching English to Buddhist monks. What could be further from “normal”? Living as a Christian in a Communist country where most people practice Buddhism—he’s still pushing the limits.

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Bed without the Breakfast

We're staying the night in Sioux Falls, in a Victorian house that was once pretty elegant but now could use a little TLC. The owner is very busy getting ready for her wedding, and offered, at a reduced rate, the bed without the breakfast.

We got here late because of detours. The Missouri is flooded.

Packing Day--grace in the corners

The most important purpose of our trip--after being present for the birth of our grandson, of course--is to deliver a carload of building materials Mike accumulated from online sites over the past six months. I was already worried about how full the car would be, and then he started pulling out of the closet a lot more things that he had bought for an earlier move that never happened. Packing enough clothes and household items to live out there for a month or two is a low priority that got lower all the time as space shrunk. We literally packed our clothes in the small spaces left between the antique shutters, Victorian light fixtures, and an antique washstand that will be turned into a bathroom sink cabinet.

I confess I wasn't very happy when I saw ceiling vents and light fixtures take the place that I thought would be reserved for luggage. But Mike and I tried earnestly to make this work while maintaining a Christian attitude. We each have a modest-sized carry-on type bag. I packed with clothes I didn't want rumpled, so I'll be wearing better and less summery clothes than I would have normally wanted to travel in. Not quite as bad as The Poisonwood Bible, where the main characters wore multiple layers of clothes on the airplane, to avoid paying extra weight...

But with a few sacrifices, we have made it! One of the sacrifices was leg room for me. Not such a great sacrifice. Sometimes there is an advantage to having short legs.

We leave behind three cats:

Jubilee, the Siamese, went to German professor Gabriele: When we took her to Gabriele's house, she was angry. She had seen our other two cats leave the house in carriers, and I think she knew she was being abandoned (from her perspective). But she's starting to adjust. She and her Siamese buddy Piccolo are racing through the house at midnight. Gabriele has trained Piccolo to sleep at night and then get up with her at 5 a.m. Gabriele will try to train her to do the same. Let's see if German fortitude can win over Siamese willfulness.

Abby, the overweight tabby: A man in Jackson took our other two cats. It wasn't love at first sight. But Abby warmed to him slowly, and I think he's warming to her too. He says she sleeps beside him on the couch, and plays with the kitten he adopted a few days later. Abby must be happy. All she wants out of life is to have a buddy and to be a couch potato.

Clea went with Abby, and seemed to make a quicker adjustment. She slept on the guy's bed the first night. Then, at the first opportunity, she ran out the door and disappeared. I was pretty upset. I had trusted God to safe homes for the cats, and then Clea took it on herself to run off.

Cats do find their way home. Clea was only a couple of miles from her old home. She's a good hunter, and savvy about coyotes. I looked at a city map, and the most direct route between her new home and her old home is through city parks and quiet streets. She could actually make it. It might take her weeks or even months, but there's no real hurry because we'll be gone for a month or two.

Wouldn't it make a great novel ending for her to come home? But this is real life.

Leaving day approaches.

We're leaving for Seattle a week from tomorrow. I say "leaving," not "moving," because the house in Jackson remains as full as ever of 33 years of living, and it is not yet on the market for sale. We should be returning in a month or two. We have an apartment to rent for September, and maybe longer. Caitlin's baby is due on the 17th, and after September we will play it by ear.

The cats are gone. We are attending many "last suppers," as Mike calls them, with friends we won't see for a while.

Now to the packing. It's going to be a mega-episode of "Clean House"!