my town

I love living in the Pacific Northwest. I adore the fact that yesterday I brought my summer clothes out of storage, dashed out under a cobalt blue sky and planted sunflowers, cosmos, and lupine, and started browsing through my file of grill recipes ... and today the rain is running in torrents off my skylights, the woodstove is blazing, and tonight's dinner consisted of grilled cheese and tomato-red pepper soup. Now, the rest of you may find that kind of flip-flopping weather schizophrenic and annoying, but not me. I'm enthralled with the not-boringness of it all.

You know, of course, that this is Latte-Land--the birthplace of Starbucks. We're also home to Boeing and Bill Gates and Microsoft. So if you've never been here, you probably think that everyone who lives here is either a fish handler down at Pike Street Market or a techie with a briefcase in one hand and a latte in the other. And that's mostly true, if you throw in a few farmers up my way, some apple growers on the East side, and a whole lot of environmentalists scattered in between. The fact is, we do have some very distinct people groups here.

This morning, while driving to Starbucks to work on a chapter, I heard the following listener-contributed joke on the radio:
You know you live in Fremont when:
--you see someone drive by with a $3000 bike on top of their $500 car
--you have no hair on top of your head but you still wear a ponytail
--your wife asks you to pick up Granola on the way home ... so you stop by the day care center.

That last one had me laughing for five minutes. I haven't yet met anyone with a child named Granola, but I'm sure they're out there. Not far from my home there used to be a commune whose members named their children "attributes": Charity, Honesty, Pure. So Granola wouldn't surprise me.

I live in an odd place. I'm often irritated by the politics and I don't much care for the garden slugs, but I couldn't imagine living anywhere else. Frequently, while walking through my thirteen acres of woods, stepping over moss-colored logs and brushing past ferns and wild huckleberry bushes, I thank God for planting me here. It was his doing, you know. Acts 17:26-27 says this:

From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. (NIV)

I hope you love your town as much as I love mine, and I hope something about your habitat has caused you to contemplate and reach for God. If you ever get to my neighborhood, let's talk about it. I'll buy you a latte first.