sunburnt shoulders

Yesterday afternoon, Rosemary and I walked Jack to work, and then kept walking.

We've been talking lately about what will happen after Jack finishes his MA; will we look for jobs here in Seattle, or will we be more likely to move back overseas? Taiwan, Korea, and Thailand come up in these conversations. The decision centers around the answer to one question: Which jobs will give us the funds, the time, and the space to not only provide English instruction to those privileged students who want another skill to add to their resumes, but also to teach those who need English as a tool to find a first living-wage job. Jack doesn't want to spend his life teaching second-language dilettantes who use English classes as an excuse for extended tourism in the USA, and he'd prefer to use his skills to help those who need it most, whether they are immigrants and refugees here, or those trapped in poverty overseas. (What a guy I married!)

So Rosemary and I kept walking, and thinking. We walked down University Way (aka "the Ave"), the smell of car exhaust and grilled meat from Asian fast food joints conjuring up Hanoi. We walked onto campus, our "public Ivy," the oldest university on the west coast, 16th in the list of the world's top universities. In the quad the Yoshino cherry trees are in full bloom, and walking beyond the gothic library we saw Mount Rainier like a landscape painting on the skywall of the campus.

In a lit class in college, my professor suggested that universities are like the garden of Eden, with their large green expanses, places for innocent youths to taste the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. Maybe, maybe not; but I wish everyone could take four years of spring days to lay on the grass and read articles, highlighter in hand, until falling asleep and waking up with sunburnt shoulders.

Farther, we turned towards Lake Washington and the snowcapped Cascades, and down a tree-lined path, I got dizzy looking up to the tops of ancient evergreens. Home through our neighborhood, and everything is flowering: plums, magnolias, camellia, rhododendrons, azaleas.

In short, we may be leaving, and we'll be leaving the most beautiful city in the world. Better than the walled cities of Tuscany, better than the Honduras rain forest, better than the pristine beaches of Thailand, better than the Swiss Alps, this is Seattle, and Rosemary was born here, and we love it.