Growing up, my dad always told me “ I don’t want to come into the world and die in the same place, I need to see somewhere else.” I’ve always admired my dad’s honesty and realism about life but he’s now 57 and still dreams of his second home in Phoenix, Arizona. Here I am, twenty-five years old and I’ve only moved approximately two and a half miles from my childhood home that I grew up in. I stay in Spokane, Washington for many reasons, mostly I’m afraid to spread my wings but I stay here for the distinct four seasons that occur at the same time each year and that content feeling that I get when I walk in the front door of my parents house that has been our home since I was six years old. Spokane will always be my home even when you hit that halfway mark to Seattle on a road trip, when the scenery changes from miles of fields to lush greenery, I still can’t wait to get back home.
I was brought home on February 24, 1990, to a quaint house on Woodward Road in Spokane Valley, Washington; before they decided to split the zip codes and make us our own “city.” I don’t remember that house as well as the one we’d soon move into six years later but I do remember the wood burning fireplace in the living room, the little wrought iron balcony that looked over the hallway into the kitchen that my cats Thumper and Batboy would peer over on a daily basis and mostly, the dining room that was always occupied with family meals, birthday parties with Barbie cakes and Ninja turtles for my brother. Soon after, we moved into a house on Loretta Drive just a mile away and the house that my aunt and uncle and my two older cousins lived in before us. This is the house that I had my best friend pick me up in her red Volkswagen Cabrio, and the place I still go to almost every Sunday for dinner with my parents. After countless remodel projects and my bubble gum pink bathroom being painted over, it still smells the same and my seventeen year old cat Lucy still makes the same cat chatter as she goes down the stairs. I’d love to own this home someday but for now, I just love visiting and still saying to my parents, “See you at the house.”
In my short but meaningful twenty-five years on Earth, I haven’t visited very many places but the places i’ve seen are not anything like Spokane, USA. Life wouldn’t be the same without that crisp fall air that starts to creep in around August 25 or the numbing cold that chills you to your bones, that makes you just want to hunker down in your heated blanket with a good book. All the places that run across my mind to move, the seasons are nothing like ours. For example, Arizona is sunny, and hotter than hell but how do you celebrate Christmas in shorts and flip flops? I tend to complain every year around the same time when the snow starts to fall and ballet flats are no longer proper footwear, but If I lived somewhere else, I would just find something else to complain about.
Going back to my dad’s early quote about living and dying in the same place, perhaps we all just want to stick with what’s familiar. You can change a lot of things about your life; get a new job, a new boyfriend/girlfriend, or a new car but there is something to be said about being born and raised in Spokane, Washington where you can get to Colbert, WA in 20 minutes, there are 3 different pho restaurants to choose from within a 3 mile radius, and where we have blocks of cars that was deemed it’s own nickname “Auto Row.”
