If there’s any month in Seattle I really struggle with the rain it’s November. It’s not a mist or a drizzle but full-on sheets of rain, sideways rain, cold, blowing rain. Rain that gets through old roofs and runs down the streets. You will not win a war with the rain.

The rain combines with darkened skies to create a pervasive sense of gloom. To cope with it I’ve had to find the beauty in the rain, and sometimes that requires imagination. I’ll look for colors and textures in the pines as they fade behind a scrim of clouds like I’m in a Japanese water color, somewhere far away.

Today we reclaimed a lost hour of sleep and now the skies are going pale with streaks of strained light. The moon looks like a broken shell washed up on the shore. First clouds appear, charcoal sketches.

It can be a solemn time of year. I feel an old sadness tug at me I have to shoo away. I flew back home to see my dad for a few days and drove past some old places we used to live. Unlike any other season, fall makes me pine for the past. Maybe it’s the sense of slow collapse, a reminder that everything just ends one day and returns to the ground.

They are blowing the debris from the streets and the leaves swirl in strange patterns and shapes. It feels like a fruitless pursuit, to take on the leaves. I am on my tractor sucking them up from the yard, shredding the leaves into bits, blowing them back onto the grass like confetti.

I flew back home and drove by the old house on 12th street. Dad said it was built in 1905; when he demoed the walls they were held together by horsehair plaster and lath. He talks about old neighbors we had, one he helped when her son died. He asks me if I remember any of them and I half lie, I do.

I sit in the rental car looking at the back of that house. My mind maps to bits of memory still hanging on from that time, 1982, ‘83. Broken blinds in the windows and rusted fences. Stacks of shit in garbage bags, sun bleached and moldy. For sale signs, sad-looking yards. These people are just hanging on.

I drive around the block to where we used to kick the soccer ball in the alley, past Brian Best’s house, past houses on my newspaper route where I knocked once a year at Christmastime hoping for a tip. I grew up here and left one day and never came back. Never had a reason to, until I realized whole parts of myself had gone missing. I hoped I’d find something here but I’m not even sure what I’m looking for, there’s only bits.

And that’s life! The bits you remember and the whole swaths you don’t. We come together with old family and friends to share what we can remember, to try to fit it back together again but it keeps coming apart.

How beautiful the colors look from the plane so high above, the Northeast in fall—turmeric and cinnamon, sage and clove—they could be the same hills I first saw as a young man, the first time I saw them that way.

We want things to stay the same but we ourselves never do. We keep coming apart too.

Categories: Memoir, prose, writing

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, pacific northwest