The last rain fell on July 10. They were saying that was it, it would be a long time before it came back. When the rain ends in Seattle it’s like time stops—and when it returns it’s like an old friend, you pick up where you left off. I walked to the bus stop without an umbrella (it was just a fine mist) and sat huddled in the back with the others on the bus, shifting from side to side in the dark, the automated voice calling out each stop. We would look back on this day and miss it.

At work on my afternoon walk I passed the Nintendo HQ, young workers with tats and jeans: today, two guys walking side by side, one with blue hair, the other, a beard he’d dyed red. They reminded me of a child’s story by P.D. Eastman, the one about two dogs who go camping (Fred and Ted): one blue, the other red. And I had to laugh but then I got sad, remembering reading that book to my kids, imagining when they’d be old enough to camp—and now they were, but not interested anymore. And when I counted the weekends we had free still, there were maybe four. We would look back on these days and miss them. But when they’d come home, it would be like they never left.

Categories: Memoir, parenting

Tags: journal writing, mid-life crisis, nostalgia, pacific northwest, parenting, Seattle, sentimentality, short form, William Pearse writer