CHANGE

I’m changing my profile. I’m no longer the “Midwesterner living in Seattle”. In August, for various reasons, we moved back to Chicago. Mainly it’s our kids’ fault. They’re all married now and producing offspring. Seattle, two or three time zones away, seemed too removed from the action. And my mom, I needed to be closer to her too. Here’s how we’re managing this latest change of residence:

We’re snowed in. If we’d left yesterday we would have made it home, now it’s a waiting game. “Sue, I need to leave…now,” Leo is saying to me as I’m checking the weather on my Mom’s computer. The place he wants to immediately quit is St. Joseph, Missouri. We’re here for the holidays and to help Mom get back on her feet. She’s been sick over four weeks and at 88 needs time to get over things like the flu and bronchitis. She’s feeling feisty again, and it’s time to head back to Chicago.
But there’s reports of snow in Iowa, where we hit last week’s blizzard, and rain and sleet in St. Louis. The computer helps a little. We can get on MoDot and Idot, transportation sites, and find out the road conditions. Then you sort of have to guess-timate the best time and route. Unfortunately, these two world travelers are having trouble navigating through the Heartland. I’ve forgotten how fast these winter storms can arrive. It’s been four winters since I experienced a blizzard.
When we lived in Seattle I proudly called myself a Midwesterner. To me it suggested someone tough, hard-working and independent. I made sure my Seattle neighbors knew I was from Chicago, that nitty, gritty, blustering city. However I omitted that it had recently been conquered by Starbucks, suburban-like townhouse developments and flowering medians on major thoroughfares. I didn’t tell them that Chicago, once the hog capital of the world, had become sissified.
Maybe I like nitty gritty because I’m from farm stock. My granddad with his perpetual suntan line across his brow wore his leathered face as a badge signifying the unending chores demanding his attention. My grandmother “Memo” carried an extra eighty pounds as her badge. The only time I ever saw her out of the kitchen was when she went to her garden or the chicken house to gather eggs or grab the soon-to-be-wrung neck of an unsuspecting chicken. She cooked gigantic meals for breakfast and “dinner,” the noon time meal which fed not only her husband and other members of the family but also the occasional hired hand who helped out with seasonal duties.
Coming from a family of farmers perhaps is also the reason I like the outdoors. Leo and I used to volunteer once a week at the University of Washington Arboretum as “volunteer gardeners.” Actually, we were weeders. We pulled unwanted stuff like wild berry root out of the ground, if we could. One day while trying to lasso in some untamed morning glories, Karen,our supervisor, remarked to me, “You can sure tell you guys are from the Midwest; you’re such hard workers!” Later I learned, as a transplanted Milwaukee-an, she, like me, didn’t feel like she fit into to the west coast lifestyle.
But if you like the out-of-doors, you’d like Seattle. You can bike out your front door, get on the Burke-Gilman path and head for Seward park. After six miles you’d be rewarded with a view of Mount Ranier and Mount Baker while riding along the edge of Lake Washington. Or you can hop in your car, drive 40 minutes on I-90 and take a 4-mile round-trip hike on Tiger mountain with an elevation gain of 1600 feet. At the top, you’d get another view of Ranier then look back over your shoulder and see the skyline of Seattle. Or in the winter you could cross-country ski at Cabin Creek, less than an hour’s drive, and not only get a month’s worth of exercise but a soul-filling dose of nature. Then there’s Seattle’s weather. You may never see Ranier, Baker, or a skyline through the mist and the fog, but the temperature never varies too far from the 40 to 50 degree range.
But that kind of weather got on my nerves. I like change, in temperature, in weather conditions, in life style. Things were too predictable there. Although I knew I’d dearly miss our friends, I was ready for the more erratic atmosphere of a big, boisterous city.
So now I living in a city where the temperature can sink to -13 one day and a week later percolate around 60 degrees. I can wear my new down-filled parka on Monday and be in shirt sleeves by Friday. On Monday I might be biking to my part-time teaching job and by Wednesday burrowing through a snow drift to the El to get to school. We’ll dropeverything of course to go cross-country skiing here on the nearby park district golf course (elevation gain 5 feet)while there’s still snow on the ground. And we'll take a bike ride along Lake Michigan in a 25 mile headwind, and get blown home in half the time on the return trip. Ah, Sweet Home Chicago.