A golden fall and hiking Mt. Rainier
The winter rains have begun here after a truly golden fall. When my family first moved to the Pacific Northwest in 1971, the falls were very monochrome. In the past 45 years, maybe some maples have moved in, as leaves are far brighter and more colorful than they once were.
The walkway to the main building at Malibu. My Nootka 3 cabin was on the middle floor overlooking the water.
Veeka has returned home after nine weeks at Ryther, a residential facility in north Seattle. A lot of things I hoped would be changed turned out not to be, partly because of the lack of staff and patient overload cut back on time that my daughter needed for therapy. By the time two months rolled around, the insurance company was threatening to stop benefits in that it felt Veeka would do just as well on an outpatient basis. So she moved home on Sept. 19.
Since then, we’ve done a bunch of hikes (something she was not allowed to do there) at WallaceFalls (just east of Everett), Skyline trail on Mount Rainier, a ghost town southeast of us in Black Diamond and multiple parks around Bellevue. The Rainier hike, on a sunny Saturday through golden fields and clumps of red-leafed shrubs and wheat grass with a huge mountain in front of us, was beyond lovely. It's a 3-hour drive to get to Paradise lodge, where the hike begins, but the crowds are way down in the fall.We visited the Amazon spheres, two huge domes smack in the middle of Seattle’s South Lake Union district that are about four stories high and contain multiple gardens and seating arrangements for Amazon employees. On the weekends, the public is allowed to wander through, so in we went earlier this month. There was a huge multi-story wall of tropical plants; a section with lounges (guess Amazonians need to lie down in order to work?) and one seating area of wooden benches dangling mid-air and called the “bird’s nest.”
Veeka and I at Wallace Falls.
One thing I got to do the weekend before Veeka’s release was to go to a women’s retreat at Malibu, a Christian youth club about 100 miles north of Vancouver, BC off the Jervis Inlet. It’s a four-day affair to drive up there and stay, so I thought I’d grab the opportunity now while I had free babysitting, so to speak. Except for the first day, it rained the entire time, unfortunately, so there was no swimming or boating to speak of except for a few hardy souls who braved weather in the 50s to venture out. I stayed in Nootka 3, a cabin very close to where I may have stayed as a teenager when I first visited Malibu in 1972. The whole place has been re-modeled to the tune of $14.5 million since then with lots of innovations (a mountain bike track and zip lines) added in. The place has no wireless for good reason; kids are supposed to put away their phones while there. Hopefully I can get Veeka up there in a few years.
My cabin was filled with lots of friendly women, several of whom had traveled up there alone, like me. The speaker was Joyce del Rosario, a Young Life staffer from California who, I was grateful to note, was also unmarried like me. One odd note was the weekend was evangelistic in that it was for winning souls even though 99.9% of the women there had been Christians a long time. I was surprised at this, as I’d expected something quite different, so I can’t say the spiritual content of the weekend was all that helpful. I needed something more for those of us who’ve been in the trenches awhile. But I was eager to take what I could in terms of respite, as being a single parent is wearing.
A year or two ago, I heard about a place called Jill's House, which offers a weekend on the Kitsap peninsula for special-needs kids so parents can have a day or two to themselves. Turns out I was swamped with a deluge of paperwork. The web site had 21 forms, many of them multiple pages including everything from HIPAA policy, medical summary, a multi-page intake profile the kid is supposed to fill out – yeah, right – to consent for services, release of information, health history, diagnoses and behavioral support, daily functioning needs – the list was endless. Many of the forms were repetitive, asking the same info (listing one’s doctors, dentist, psych, etc. ad nauseum) so the same thing gets asked over and over. Then I had to print out 21 pages and then scan them ALL with signatures. Who has the time of day to do this? It turns out that we got turned down because the weekend was for a whole different type of kid than Veeka. Unfortunately that info was not communicated to me before I put in hours of work on those dratted forms.
Veeka at the Spheres.
Halloween is this week and I’ll be taking Veeka out trick-or-treating this year, as she still likes to go and dress as Jasmine from the Aladdin films. I am working on some articles for Religion News Service and the Seattle Times magazine plus Interfaith Voices out of Maryland finally released a tape of their interview with me about my serpents book that was recorded last April. I’ve done a few book appearances lately but have had no luck in selling books at either venue. I think my serpents book would do a lot better if I were still living in Tennessee rather than here. My next appearance is at the Emerald Downs Holiday Gift Festival southeast of Seattle so if you’re free the Nov. 10-11 weekend, please come! I'll also have a few dozen quilted Texas star potholders for purchase.