Golden days

The last day of August!  All prior complaints about Seattle weather should now be deemed inoperative.  The last few weeks have been so beautiful that ... well ... that I wonder how the rest of the nation can live anywhere else?

My sister visited Seattle for four days, a couple of weeks ago.  Her visit coincided with the hottest days of the year, which -- in Seattle -- means the low 90's.  We ate all our meals outdoors.  On my deck, yes, but also at lots of small cafés.  Yes, for the few weeks feasible, Seattle restaurants and coffee houses convert themselves virtually overnight into small European sidewalk cafés, giving the illusion that we live most of the year in the dry, hot, sunny weather of Rome or Athens.

Today, the eve of the long Labor Day weekend, I took a long walk from my house down to the lakefront at Madison Park, and then looped back home on Lake Washington Boulevard.  If you don't know Seattle, it doesn't matter.  You get the picture.

The air was relatively cool -- just under 70 degrees -- but the sun was hot.  Typically "early pre-autumn" around here, inspiring the same sensation you get at higher elevations during the hotter days of mid-summer.  I strolled into a Starbucks in Madison Park, bought a latte, and sat sipping it at a sidewalk table -- watching and eavesdropping on the pedestrian crowds.  

Passers-by in Madison Park don't live on food stamps.  I overheard much talk of friends just getting home from Europe, of winter plans for escapes to Hawaii, of kids heading back east to college.  Sitting at the next table were a couple of boys in their early teens with orthodontia, Lakeside School t-shirts, and nicely modulated voices -- self-confident kids who initiated a friendly chat with a passing woman about the pedigree of her small leashed dog.

All seemed well at Starbucks, so I meandered onward another couple hundred yards to the waterfront.  The beach was less crowded than when my sister was here, but the temperature today was also 20 degrees cooler.  Even so, the offshore diving float was well-occupied with tanned swimmers; younger kids were splashing around near shore, inside the rope safety barrier; and parents and other sun-lovers of all ages were sprawled all over the grassy slopes that separate Lake Washington from the modest but expensive housing for which the neighborhood is known. 

This is great, I thought!  Why don't I come down to this area more often?  I probably would, I replied with cold rationality, if it weren't usually so  so chilly and damp.

My route home -- south on McGilvra, past large, tasteful homes that engender nervous feelings of financial inferiority and past the Seattle Tennis Club (whose waiting list for admission, last I heard, was about ten years); then up winding and heavily forested Lake Washington Boulevard, cutting across switchbacks on nicely groomed trails; past the woodsy Bush School; skirting the Arboretum; and eventually back to my own neighborhood.

When Seattle wants to dazzle, it really knows how.  And because the days per year when such a stroll is enjoyable are numbered, my sense of joy and exhilaration today was intensified.  The old joke about hitting yourself over the head with a hammer because it feels so good when you stop rings true to some extent.  We (or at least I) need those months of Seattle gloom and rain to really appreciate the days we are experiencing now. 

You can only stare at a sunset with admiration so long before you get bored.  That's my justification for living in Seattle rather than San Diego or Honolulu.  I have to believe residents of those cities are jaded, weary of paradise, impervious to perpetual beauty.  Otherwise, why don't they walk around with permanent smiles pasted on their silly faces?

I really need to believe this.  Really, really badly.