In the late 1970s, I used to peruse the bootlegs in a record store in Seattle’s University District. They had plain white sleeves with xeroxed images of the artists tucked in the plastic wrap. I still have my bootleg of Joni Mitchell’s early songs, some of them never otherwise released. 

This kind of random memory kept coming to mind last month as my spouse Arline and I packed our house in preparation for moving to Portland. It was as if I was leaving, not Seattle, but my childhood. 

My parents moved us around the country, following my father’s academic career, until I was twelve. Just before my father was about to get tenure in Green Bay in 1975, he resigned, piled us into our Valiant, and drove us to Seattle, where he worked for the University of Washington on short-term contracts for many years before becoming a senior lecturer. My mother ran the Forestry Library.

In the picture above, my mother, brother, and I stand in front of the house my parents had just bought for $36,950 (taxes were $320.37 that year). A camellia by the front door would be a monster shrub by the time Arline and I bought the house from my mother in 2022. In between, I left Seattle for college and graduate school and returned in 1994. 

Seattle has always been a special place for me. When I was a child, we would drive from my maternal grandparents’ house in Spokane to Seattle, where my paternal grandparents lived, and as we came down from Snoqualmie Pass and drove across Lake Washington, the light glanced off the waves and the air turned fresh and cool. 

On our visits, we would take ferries across the Sound just to ride a ferry. I would go on the amusement park rides at Seattle Center. At my grandparents’ house, I would sit on the floor in front of the color television and watch J.P. Patches, the clown mayor of the city dump. One year he looked right at me and wished me a happy birthday.

When I was gone as an adult for eight years, I never doubted that I would someday return to Seattle. And I did. And I lived there three more decades. But as I approach retirement, Arline and I wanted to move to a more walkable, more affordable city. We found a lovely condo next door to one of the best bookstores in the world, Powell’s. Most everything we need is close by. We can walk to restaurants, several grocery stores, and a huge city park. 

The leaving has been bittersweet, of course, mostly because we’re three hours further from many of our friends and family. What has surprised me is the surge of nostalgia for a city that no longer exists. In that city, my grandmother is playing the piano and I am singing “Sur le Pont” in the living room with a view of sailboats on Lake Washington. In that city, my father is alive and pouring wine on the deck as we admire the rhododendrons and azaleas in his garden. In that city, my mother doesn’t have Alzheimer’s. It’s the city where I don’t have to be grown up.

Seattle will always be the city of my heart. I think of how it comes into view as the ferry from Bainbridge approaches. The Space Needle. Smith Tower. The black skyscraper people call “the box the Space Needle came in.” We stand on the deck and feel the ferry humming through the water. The gulls wheel and call. Above us, on those wondrous summer days, are the bluest skies we’ve ever seen.