40 years grateful

Around a year ago, I started posting some of my scribbles about my life and my family under the Instagram tag: #40yearsgrateful. Among all of my sketches, (close to 70 of them) there is a picture of a couple at the beach in Mexico. From the comments you can deduce that the woman is celebrating her 40th birthday in Mexico with her partner, and apparently she has two little boys (like me!) I wonder if she has noticed that this picture of them is surrounded by my drawings. I wonder if she has similar moments like the ones I sketch, and if she can relate to any of them. Each one of these #40yearsgrateful sketches has made me smile, or laugh, or feel gratitude for my life, (even the painful ones). They capture something that I believe is true and important and funny. I love my weird sense of humor, and I love my kids and how challenging they are, and how difficult parenting is. I love all of it. This is what makes me want to illustrate. This is what I love to do. If I can capture moments like this, and share them with you and with the world, I will be doing my life’s greatest work. Cheers to #40yearsgrateful, and cheers to being grateful that I have made it to my forties, and that my fortieth year is almost over. And cheers to @katrinamoline. I hope that you are surviving 2020 just fine.

iAmore

You arrived in my life just two days ago, but I know that I will love you. I’ve been pining for you for months. Now that you are here, I ache to luxuriate in the syrupy curves and flourishes that will flow from me to you. Though we are in the same room, though my fingers itch, I cannot touch you. When my children cease their constant demands and settle to bed, I will grasp the moment, and your stylus, and blissfully surrender to my base desire. Oh, new iPad with Apple Pencil and Procreate, true love can hardly wait. 

I just submitted this to The NY Times Tiny Love Stories. 

Tee hee. 

The Dream House (part 4)

The next day the seller's agent called me and I told her that I didn’t think we’d put an offer in. It was just so sudden, and we really weren’t ready to take the leap.

Then she said the thing that I’m sure all good realtors know to say, and it was, “well, don’t be shy to just put an offer in. You will only know for sure you won’t get it if you don’t make an offer at all. You never know.” She gave me the contact info for a buyer’s agent who lived right in the neighborhood in Port Ludlow. Of course, I was back on my toes, feeling like that was exactly what I was thinking. Why not put an offer in at a price we were comfortable with. Why not? You never know. Nothing to lose, right? 

Not thirty minutes later, I got a text from M. I laughed out loud because it was as if the universe was reading my mind. I had been thinking of M because she is my only friend who is in reality, and I had already literally trusted her with our lives. She was the midwife who was present in my ear, carefully coaching me through the birth of my first child, which was a rush to the hospital situation that was supposed to be a peaceful home birth. M was texting me, because she would soon be selling a house in our neighborhood. I texted her back that I’d actually been thinking of her because we were considering making an offer on a house on the peninsula, and that it was a very long shot, but if we got it, would she sell our house? “Is it the house on Olympus? Have you contacted a buyer’s agent?” she asked.

“Yes, that’s it! No, I haven’t contacted a buyers agent”. I tried to let her know the situation as best as I could. “Let’s talk tonight” she recommended, and so that later that night C and I had a conversation with her. 

I was immediately sure that if we were going to make an offer on this house at all, I wanted M on our team. Everything she said gave me confidence in that fact. She clarified for us, that in a seller’s market, there is no “deal”. The deal, or the win, is that you get the house. That’s it. The most attractive offer wins. 

After talking to M, we were even less sure that we wanted to make an offer. If we didn’t want to go “all in”, maybe it wasn’t worth the time and effort on everyone’s part. We kept weighing the pros and cons of Seattle and Port Ludlow. We made an online spreadsheet to help us decide and we threw Tacoma, Entiat/Chelan and Bellingham in as well. The spreadsheet had an algorithm that helped us come up with different categories and weighed each of them on how important they were to us. We kept coming up almost completely balanced between Seattle and Port Ludlow.  

C was beginning to lean more toward actually just saying “No. Let’s let this one go.” I really wanted to let him have his true feelings and thoughts. I did not want to try to convince him to make this happen. I didn’t want to be the pusher. It had been him more than me who'd started feeling like maybe we were ready to think about moving out of Seattle. I didn’t want to try to convince him, but….

I couldn’t help myself. I made my pitch. “C, I know for certain that we don’t want to make a decision based on Covid, but when I imagine living out there, now, rather than later, I see our kids getting a chance to play with other kids in the driveway. I see them in a school pod with S’s kids. With even some childcare, the time would provide me with the opportunity to pursue children’s book illustration. There is a great community of authors and illustrators on the peninsula whom I already know online.” 

“Let’s do it.” he said, and I saw a clear view of his love for me. It gave me the greatest feeling in the world to watch my beloved make a genuine move like this for me and for my dreams. I did not want to miss the moment. So, right then, I got down on one knee, and I took C’s hand in mine, and I said, “Will you please buy this house for me” 

We laughed a lot and hugged and kissed and e-mailed M that we would put an offer in on the house. We would bid up to the maximum amount that we could afford. We ordered a pre-inspection, so that our offer would look as good and as serious as it could. We wrote a very sweet note to the owners, and we crossed all of our crossables. Then we went out for Dick's Burgers for dinner. 

The next day, now that we were all in, I couldn’t help really hoping that it would happen, even though it was still a very long shot. I made a wish over my cauldron fire pit. We texted S and her mom, to let them know we had an offer on the table and shared the note with them that we had written to the owners. We were texting with our families and dear friends and with D and J, who are good friends of ours, who had also put in an offer on a house, with M, in Seattle that would be reviewed that same day. I had not felt that alive in quite quite a while. It felt so good to have everything on the line and to be possibly throwing our life down a new and different path, one we were not sure we could manage, but one that would undoubtably be rich with experience. 

A few hours later I got a text from J, “We didn’t get the house. Maybe if we had another 100K”. I knew that this would be the most likely scenario for us as well. I went to Green Lake that evening with two of my dearest Seattle friends for a socially distanced picnic, and we ate some of the yummiest food and drank delicious wine from one of my favorite Seattle restaurants, Lupo, which is owned by friends of ours. While I was with my friends, I got the message that the house went to someone else for a cash offer of 50K more than our bid. 

I was sad but happy, happy/sad. I was able to be joyful that I did not have to leave the friends and family that make this city mine. I didn’t have to leave the city, which was full of the diversity that I want to raise my kids in. We may someday move away, maybe to the peninsula. One thing I know now, though, is that we are not stuck. Adventure awaits in one way or another. Also, now that I have learned that I care enough about writing and illustrating that I would leave so many things that I love just for the hope that new circumstances would propel me into making it happen sooner, it revives my motivation to do more with what little time I have.

Also, why not dream big? Universe, my dream house has a VIEW!!!

The Dream House (part 3)

I reached out to the seller's agent, and sent e-mails to our bank, because in Covid times you can’t even look at a house if you don’t have a pre-approval letter from your financial institution. Then back to our remodel with my parents. It was all going so well! My parents brought their airstream trailer over and the giant, rusty dump truck full of scaffolding, sawzalls, nail guns and the works for tools. My dad and I made all of the supply runs and we picked up those used windows C had found. When we first saw them, we couldn’t even tell if they were nice, because they were so thickly covered in dirt and dust. But once we got them home and sprayed off, we could see that they were actually brand new and had never been installed. Score!

Another amazing and unexpected find was something I just needed my mom’s fresh and artistic eye to spot. I had been pondering a way to upgrade our rock ring fire pit. I wanted it to be able to have a table top of some sort, because we rarely used it for fires, and now that most of our socializing is done outdoors, maybe it would make it a more comfortable sitting and eating space when family was visiting. Even though this idea wasn’t really a priority, my mom looked at their cabin for more rocks or bricks for me, and she tried to help figure out the best way to help me make this happen. (I had been inspired by the brick fire ring at their cabin, and the tabletop that my dad had made for it.) She brought me several nice rocks when they came over to remodel the room. We arranged the new rocks with the old ones, and after a quick peek around my yard, she came back to me and said, “Ruthie, what about this?!” She was pointing at a large black pot that I was using to grow a few plants. “Yes!! That’s it!!” It was actually a cauldron that my Grammy had given me around when we had first bought our house. So we emptied it of plants and hosed it off and rolled it over to the fire ring!! Perfect! I haven’t found the table top yet, but right away we started having evening fires, and it is just the most wonderful, witchy fire pit I can imagine! Many good spells will be cast there.

We had a great time. We all did construction during the day, with breaks for good food, splashing in “Blubby” the pandemic bag pool with the kids, and lots of playing with Beau James, the doggie. In the evenings, we drank wine and ate more good food and made fires and s’mores, cast happy spells and sang happy songs around the cauldron fires. 

During the second week of remodeling, I figured out a plan to see the house in Port Ludlow. It was officially on the market as a “hot home”. Offers would be reviewed in less than a week. I figured that we might as well get ourselves out there to see the house before it was gone, so we made an appointment with the seller's agent to see the house. Sadly, S and her family would be away for the day so we wouldn’t get to see them. Her parents, lived just behind them in the same driveway, so S insisted that we go visit them and see the dahlia garden. We invited C’s parents to come see the house with us and they agreed.

That Sunday morning, we got up early and caught a ferry from Edmonds. The sun was out, and there was hardly a cloud in the sky. The salty air refreshed our lungs, and like most times that we go out to the peninsula or the San Juan Islands, we exclaimed, “Why don’t we do this more often?!” It is just so beautiful. We turned on to the driveway, and there looking out over the water was the sweet house. Right behind it and in front of S and her husband M's house, was a sailboat with a giant sign that read DUMP TRUMP. We chuckled, because we figured that they were ‘subtly’ doing what they could to let their future neighbors know who they would be living next to. 

It looked like a LOT of people were interested in this particular house. Several other agents were there, and there was a showing right before ours, and we heard that it was booked all weekend. When we got our chance to look around, I went inside the front door and really couldn’t see any of it, because THAT VIEW! I had to have my mother-in-law take a close look at the details, because when you are blasted with that much beauty, things become a little bit surreal.

It was just stunning. The open kitchen/dining/living room looked right out over the sound and to the east. The main floor bedroom and the upstairs bedroom had the same unbelievable view. The house had an adorable spiral staircase and a Harry Potter closet under the stairs that my kids wanted to move into right then and there. It had a very nice enclosed garage that looked like it would be an amazing art studio and project area. Oh, and apple trees and a garden and a tree house. A home with a VIEW! It was a dream that I had never even thought to entertain, because it seemed so unattainable. To even allow myself to imagine living there gave me a new sense of love for my own human experience. For what could be my life!!

After we looked around, we walked up the driveway to have a visit with, S’s parents. We chatted with them for an hour or so about the neighborhood, gardening and the fact that S's kids, (who are almost exactly our kids ages), were organized with other kids in the area as a school pod so that the parents could work. Then Maggie loaded me up with bouquets of gorgeous dahlias and apples from the trees and we went to Fort Flagler to spend the rest of that bluebird day picnicking on the beach with our kids and Cam’s parents. It was lovely. 

Then we went back home to Seattle. Our little house was just as dear and welcoming and still in the middle of a big (for us) construction project. We settled back in and I was pretty much completely convinced that there was no way we would be able to get that house, because with all the interest, there was sure to be a ‘bidding war’, and that was just not for us, no matter how amazing the opportunity might be.