Northwesting it

I spent a few days visiting my mother in Mukilteo Washington. I had big plans of going into Seattle and looking at art and other diligent activities, but in the end found that I was perfectly content to drink coffee, run up and down the hills around her house, look at the ferries that leave from the terminal all day from down town (a pleasant jog away) and sift through a few thrift stores. I found myself falling into the folly of all those that show up in the pretty summer months: "wow it's so beautiful I could live here." Forgetting how dark and brutal the winters are.

"Blackberries. Nothing, not mushrooms, not ferns, not moss, not melancholy, nothing grew more vigorously, more intractably in the Puget Sound rains than blackberries. Homeowners dug and chopped, and still they came. Park attendants with flame throwers held them off at the gates. In the wet months, blackberries spread so wildly, so rapidly that dogs and small children were sometimes engulfed and never heard from again. In the peak of the season, even adults dared not go berry picking without a military escort. Blackberry vines pushed up through solid concrete, forced their way into polite society, entwined the legs of virgins, and tried to loop themselves over passing clouds."--Tom Robbins,

Still Life with Woodpecker