My mother in Seattle
My mother flew home this morning after nine days in Seattle. It was her second visit in five years. The first was a long weekend when I'd just moved, when it rained the whole time and she spent most of it helping me put up shelves, so this time she came in September, on purpose, and the weather did what it was told.
She is sixty-four, and she climbed the stairs to my apartment every day without once using the handrail, which I know because she told me so every day. She slept in my bed and I slept on the couch, which is how she has done it in my apartments since I was eighteen, and which I have stopped arguing about.
We took the ferry to Bainbridge on the second day. She stood on the deck the whole way over and the whole way back, with her coat buttoned to the neck, and watched the city get small. She said the water was the wrong color: too green, not cold enough. She said it as if it were a defect the ferry company should know about. Then a seal put its head up near the dock and she went quiet, and on the way back she said that if she lived here she'd ride it every week just to have somewhere to go and come back from. That's the nicest thing she said about Seattle all week, and it was about leaving it.
Pike Place she loved, and wanted not to. She was suspicious of the fish throwing, which she called "theater," and stood and watched it for twenty minutes. She bought a bag of cherries she said were overpriced and ate the whole bag on a bench. She found a used bookshop down on one of the lower levels that I've walked past a hundred times and never gone into, and she was in there for an hour and came out with three paperbacks and a list of what they had shelved in the wrong section, which she very nearly handed to the man at the counter.
The Space Needle she would not go up. She looked at it from the bottom for some time, and then she said, "It looks like something that's waiting for a ride." I told her there's a glass floor at the top now, so you can see straight down. She said she'd seen down, from Enger Tower, for free, and she didn't need to pay to do it in a place that looked like that. We had coffee across the street instead and she asked me questions about my work that I couldn't answer, and was unbothered when I couldn't, because she has always understood that some things are just not yours to tell.
On the last night we sat on the roof of my building with a blanket and watched the lights come on downtown. She asked me if I was happy here. I said yes, mostly. She said that was a good answer, because people who say yes without the mostly aren't paying attention.
The apartment is very quiet tonight. She left the bed made with the corners tucked, the way she does, and a note on the pillow with the name of the bookshop on it, in case I'd forgotten.
When someone you love comes to see where you live, do you see it differently afterward?