It was raining in Sacramento Easter weekend, and Seattle was sunny, warm, all spring. Washingtonians were complaining about the heat wave. Nearly everywhere we went, we were informed of how it had snowed just the week before, how HOT it was, and how much happier the whole city seemed.
I know I was happy to be “on Spring Break,” to be a tourist, to have, no matter how far behind I might fall, a couple of days of spring.
Seattle’s skyline is punctuated by the inverted exclamation point of the Space Needle by day and by dark. One night, after dinner on the banks of Lake Union, we climbed to the top of a hill in Gas Works Park to attempt to translate the sentence of light the stars reflect onto the skyline. I cannot yet decode the full sense of the expression. I cannot yet discern if it is slogan, idiom, or prayer.
And then, out of the shadows, my friend’s son, only eight, asked: “How come we can see Jupiter but we can’t see Russia or Alaska?”
