Surviving Winter in Seattle

To love the Seattle area for 1/3 of the year is easy. It's jaw-dropping beautiful on every horizon. However, those other 2/3's are challenging:

• gray skies when you wake up until the sun you rarely see goes down
• happiness for day-long "showers," since a "rain" means  mud slides & sometime flooding
• cold weather that penetrates
• a thriving green lawn that's not grass, but moss

HOWEVER,

I wouldn't live anywhere else! The secret to happiness here is a fulfilling job, sports, or hobby. Duplicate Bridge & jewelry making save me... AND the certainty that deeply hidden in that grim sky are majestic, tall mountain ranges I will see again in a few months on the eastern & western horizons, PLUS The Mountain (our name for Rainier) to the southeast. (DIGRESSION: In 1973 when we moved here from New Orleans, I could not understand why the traffic snarled over our 2 major floating bridges on perfectly sunny days with no auto accident reports. So I turned on the radio for the traffic update. The cause? "A sunshine slow-down over the 2 Lake Washington floating bridges because The Mountain is out!") Yep, we Satellites (I'm one of them now) don't take nature's beauty for granted!!!

So after looking out my windows for these last few months at gray wetness, the green, mossy lawn, & garden patches of brown, limp, dead flower stalks, I spent last week creating my own flowers. I hope these roses & peonies go to a good home because they're my favorite flowers, but they got me through another gray week & they won't go limp in the weather.