People always wonder what it would be like to move back to a place that, because of distance, practically exists only in memory. When someone actually does it, there’s got to be a story in there, right? It’s got to be fascinating to move away from a place for, say, a decade, then go back to see what’s happened; settle down again, maybe try to make it the same as it was before. The same as when you were younger.
Of course you know that’s impossible, so I won’t even try to go there. Things are never the same as they were before. I know that, excuse me, I knew that.
I lived in Seattle for several years, and in that time I took the whole region to heart, then left for a decade (well, 11 years if you want to nitpick). My un-Washington years were spent north of Atlanta, where I got married, co-owned a house (which we spent years filling with stuff) and even had a baby, a glorious son. I achieved things there I never did on the West Coast, not even close. But still….
In all this time, I pined, I planned; I always wished in some vague overall way that we were back in the Northwest. But I had no idea how to make it happen, well, I did, but the expenditure of energy, gosh. Forget it. And the risk too, why not stand pat with a good thing, even though my experience told me things could be better?
So I waited. Then one day in 2018 my job offered me a transfer opportunity; and through a combination of our wanderlust, nostalgia, hope for the future and the fuck-it-ness brought about by the sheer exhaustion of raising a one year old, we took a few days to think and decided to go all in. It was a huge process, something I couldn’t have done alone, but luckily my unshakable wife took this all on with zeal and positive energy.
This story isn’t about the move, however, for everybody moves, right? This is America. It’s about what I found and am still finding after I got back to the Land of Pines.
My first thing was to drive around, drive everywhere, here there, with no destination. I was sure I still remembered more of the Seattle city layout after all the years away than I had ever learned as a near-Atlanta resident. I used to equate my refusal to learn all the Peachtree streets, avenues and the metro grid as a kind of organ rejection. GPS was my daily friend.
Unfortunately, at first anyway, it was also my friend in Seattle, even in the north end that I thought I knew so well. I used GPS to go back and forth from work to Renton. Renton is just south of Seattle and where we had landed after seemingly dropping out of the sky the first few days of 2019. My app reliance bugged me, I guess, because if I had remembered it all I could kind of fool myself into thinking maybe I’d never left. I got over it though, especially when I saw so many things and reacquainted with some of the people that were right where I had left them in 2007.
My sister said I came back here for the restaurants, because I kept going on about the old haunts that remained. And in a way she was totally right. In this I was seeking the old familiarity. And it was there, my old friends may have been a little older, most had touches of grey hair. Houses looked the same, sometimes a little different in ways I couldn’t place. But me and my old friends happily caught up and reminisced about old times. My wife and son are also in the process of making new friends here.
A week after arriving I started noticing physical differences between the then of 2007 and now. This should be the best part of a story like this because it’s what all my old friends asked me when I got back. It’s what people wonder. It’s what the people we left behind in Georgia ask about. OK, at first it was those green Lime bikes. So strange how I found them everywhere, laying down abandoned as if by fleeing Pripyat residents. Except for on the Seattle Waterfront, I’ve still never seen anybody riding them. Many times the sight of those bikes pulled me out of my reverie and jerked me back to present day Seattle, a city that has gotten a little bigger, and yeah, with a little more traffic. And oh, the horror of all of those mixed use mid rises that have popped up around Lake Union. Complaints about them are a pasttime here.
I tried to grouse at first too, to complain that they’d torn down the this or that to make way for something for Amazon or Google or whoever. Old Seattle was dead they said, and I tried to believe. I really did. But my heart simply wasn’t in it. I was too happy. For I was back and the pretty large amount of familiarity I’d immediately rediscovered was more than enough to tide me over until the other thing happened.
The other thing that happened was about three months after my return and it was a surprise. I no longer needed the GPS and abandoned it (‘after three months!’ you may say in astonishment, but hey, my job has me driving around everywhere). Accompanying my remembrance of the street layout I noticed stuff like why maybe this house looked different or why I couldn’t remember a certain Roosevelt Avenue business there. The house had been painted of course (I remembered the old color), and that business used to be a Magnolia hi-fi. I was suddenly able to pick out all the new buildings that had gone up since I’d left, the little ones you know, not the architectural obviousness of Lake Union. I remembered the hoarder lady on 45th Ave and where the Sci Guy parks his car near Green Lake. My residential memory had returned. After three months I felt as though I had never left.
The other day I bragged to my wife that I’d informed a couple of people I had just met that I had been a “Seattle resident for twenty years.” At first I didn’t get her disappointed expression but then I realized the inherant denial of my Georgia years implied by that statement. I didn’t mean to do that, for I am proud of my time there, of my wife and my son. I guess I was so excited that full memory of this place had returned that it felt like the truth. And in that memory’s return, I not only felt good again, but even a little younger, not like it was before, but I’ll aver, damn near close!
So now I have unexpected answers to the questions, “What’s it like? What’s different, what’s the same?” All of the things I can see are different, that you can see too but maybe they do not matter so much, would have changed whether I was here or not; the heavier traffic, the skyscrapers. Residents know all this already, it took a while to realize this is not what they’ve been wanting to know.
Nothing has changed, nothing at all. Granted there is a lot that is different on the surface, sure, but I don’t complain. Because it all folds into the experience of the city, the region, the state. It’s all good because this is my town, and it seems it always has been. I do not regret moving away years ago because apparently it’s always been in me. I’m back, but by now it lacks the drama I always imagined would remain when I was Back East.
If you do decide to leave a place you love, try not to stay away too long, maybe no longer than fifteen years. It takes a bit of time for the remembered sights to become familiar again; of the bald eagles flying by the freeway, the sunbreaks and how on a windy day the water on one side of the floating bridge looks so different than on the other side. And speaking of all this, I have things I’ve gotta do, the sun just came out and I’ve got to go grab a piece of the PNW.
