I’ve been working, as is my tradition, in a reception during the non-holiday days of these three weeks of Christmas. The same reception as last Christmas. And I wrote on the blog then too. I was reading Outlander on my lunches then, now I’m in the middle of A Dance with Dragons. They are kind of the same, those two. More about the adventure and action, long books, twisting intrigues. It’s the kind of book that reads well at Christmas.
I’ve been drinking coffee. I never drink coffee, but now I’ve been drinking coffee. To stay awake. Because I don’t sleep at night. Instead, I knit and watch the fifth season of Grey’s Anatomy. That’s the season when Christina meets Owen. Callie meets Arizona. Lexie hooks up with Mark. Izzie is still around, and so is George. And Meredith finally gets married to Derek – on a post-it! It’s a very important season. And it might be the best. Now that I’ve almost seen it from beginning to end.
And drinking the coffee makes me think of that first morning when I arrived in Seattle and drank a chocolatey Mocha Cookie Crumble Frappuccino at the Starbucks by Pioneer Square. This older man started talking with me and I just felt so welcomed, despite the tiredness and confusion of arrival. I think that was when I decided to love Seattle. Right there, only less than an hour into my stay.
I’m back in the reception where I spent my summer of 2010 and the last days of 2011 and some odd days in between. And Grey’s Anatomy is set in Seattle. They have plenty of air shots of the Space Needle and the ferry boats. I never took a ferry in Seattle, and I never went up into the Space Needle – but see, this is just an example of how everything just goes in circles. We build our lives, piece by piece, and sometimes we come back to the same old stone, to add another memory onto the old one.
Today, I think of life as a round tower that I build in a spiral and now I’m back where I was once before. Slightly different, but still the same. Today, I find that comforting. Because, I love Seattle. And I love Grey’s Anatomy. And I even love coffee, even though it makes crazy like a Disney squirrel.
Katja Malmborg 