It was the last time I walked straight into a plate glass window, the last time I lived on the water and the last time I dug clams. I probably haven't fallen in love with my best friend again since, nor listened to Anita Baker crooning "You Bring Me Joy."
The house was an old oyster processing plant built over the tides on creosote soaked wooden pilings on the Puget Sound. Down a steep gravel and dirt driveway lined with evergreens, around a bend by a rambling red house and at the very bottom next to the beach, the house was nothing short of a miracle. L shaped, two separate places - one for me and my roommates, and one inhabited by my landlady, a painter, and her cranky old man. Our house, the one I lived in with various roommates over a two year period, had two living rooms, two bathrooms, three bedrooms, two wood stoves (our only source of heat) and a small greenhouse I used as a bedroom my first year there. Lying under the glass during a Northwest downpour was like being in the middle of a storm on a ship, or so I imagined.
Things got bad sometimes there, the way they might for any college student struggling with schoolwork, friendships and unrequited love. But then there was the salt water tide coming in and out, sometimes gently and sometimes in a stormy cauldron of inlet waves. On a clear day, Mt. Rainer hung in the distance of the horizon over the edges of the trees. On a rainy day, one just knew it was there.
The beach was made not from sand or rocks, but millions of weather and water bleached oyster shells. In the sun they were almost too white to look at, on a dreary day, they reflected the dark clouds. And out on the dilapidated dock, no more than a few pilings and some boards, cormorants would pose still, wings spread, sunning themselves on warm days.
The second year we were there, my friend and roommate and I filled the old rowboat next to the deck with dirt and planted flowers with names like Fried Egg, Lobelia, Allysum. She taught me about flowers and I made her laugh. A golden time.
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