This photo was taken in February of last year. The rain had stopped, and a shaft of light was illuminating the landscape. It looked like a delicate watercolor painting, and I wanted to capture and preserve that moment. I have no regular camera, but there is a camera function on my Kindle Fire and I decided to see what I could get. I moved up close to the center section of the bay window and managed to hold the Kindle still enough to catch this shot. I was surprised how good it came out, happy that I was able to preserve that moment of glorious light.

It is mid-April now, and there are tiny, bright green leaves one the deciduous trees in the wetland. The view out my window is transforming from winter to its summer dress. Soon foliage will dominate the scene, almost completely blocking the view of the sky. It will still be beautiful, but I shall not try to capture it in a photo. All it would really show are the leaves of the young stewartia that is almost invisible in the photo I took in February.

I love this view through my front windows. I love this modest house, part of a small, over-fifty-five community on the edge of Bellingham, a small city in the northwest corner of Washington State. The houses in this complex sit on a low ridge behind a wetland, and that wetland means the view out my window will stay much as it is now in years to come. No construction is allowed there. Any changes will be those that climate and insects and beavers bring. My house is just five minutes away from shops and the freeway, but here it is quiet, invisible to almost all the people who drive on the major arterial on the other side of the wetland.

Bill and I bought this house in 2012, the year he turned eighty and finally retired from full-time ministry. That was the year that the housing slump hit bottom, and there were empty houses in Bellingham at rock-bottom prices. Any other year and we would not have been able to buy a house here. Bellingham is one of those beautiful places where land and houses are quickly snatched up by those who have money. Young people cannot afford to live here now, nor can the artists and artisans who have made this place such a fun place to live. Bill and I are among the lucky ones, but there is no self-congratulation with that luck. I’m very glad we were able to buy this house and move here. I love Bellingham, but I am also very sad about what is happening to it. Gratitude and grief, side by side. Neither feeling cancels out the other.

This house in Bellingham is where my life has brought me. I left Seattle for Berkely, California in September 1977, a move I saw as temporary. I fully intended to return to Seattle when I finished my work at The Graduate Theological Union. That intention was set aside when I met Bill Haney, the man who has now been my husband for forty years. Building a life together took us to the Mid-West, to St. Louis and Columbia, Missouri. Our years there were good years, but always there was a longing to return to the Northwest. Specifically where in Washington State, I didn’t know. Seattle was beautiful, but I no longer wanted to live there. It was too big, too congested. Then in 2002 my daughter Nina Renee moved to Bellingham to be with the man who became her husband. I came out to visit her and fell in love with the town. This is the place I wanted to live, this beautiful town at the foot of Mount Baker, on edge of Bellingham Bay across from the San Juan Islands. That was my dream, a dream that felt impossible. That the dream came true still feels almost unbelievable.