After Bill and I married and I moved to Bellevue, I was still longing for Arizona’s wide-open spaces. In the Seattle suburbs of Bellevue and Kirkland there’s a park called Bridle Trails made up of second growth Douglas firs that provide a thick green canopy over streets and houses alike. The first time we drove through there I told Bill, “I could never live here. It’s too dark.”

When 2006 came along, we were living in a downtown Seattle condo within spitting distance of the Space Needle. At the time Colt was only a few months old, and his father, Jon, was in the last few months of his nine-year battle against melanoma. I spent hours each day commuting back and forth from downtown Seattle to the east side of Lake Washington where Jon and Jeanne T. lived.

One day Bill said to me, and this is a direct quote. “Our daughter is going to be a single mom. We need to live closer.” We went house hunting with only two real requirements. Bill’s knees were bad, so we needed a home with a ground floor master, and it needed to be on the Eastside. Guess where we ended up—the south end Bridle Trails. (Never say never, right?)

The thing is, whoever bought this lot to begin with must not have liked the canopy any more than I did. He ended up clear-cutting the whole property. Our house looks like a Mediterranean villa airdropped into a splash of sunlight in the middle of a dark green forest.

A month after we moved in, the first event we hosted here was the reception after Jon’s burial in the Coast Guard cemetery in Cle Elum. Colt was nine months old at the time. The intervening seventeen years have passed in a blink. He’s eighteen now and just graduated from Lake Washington High School.

This past Saturday we hosted a graduation reception for him here at the house. It was advertised as an outdoor open house complete with swimming pool and was scheduled to be from two to six PM.

Around here, we’re currently living through what the weather people are calling Juneuary—a time of whiplash weather where we’re freezing one moment and too hot the next. All last week the seven-day forecasts were brutal with torrential downpours expected over the coming weekend. We went ahead with our plans but with a good deal of foreboding.

Saturday morning, wanting to get some of my steps out of the way, I went outside to do some laps around the pool—190 steps per lap. Amazingly enough it was overcast but definitely not raining. Jeanne T. called on the phone informing me that the weather at their house, five miles away, was terrible. “It’s sunny here,” I told her. She wondered what I was drinking besides coffee.

By the time the caterer arrived at noon and began setting up out in the gazebo, it was all blue skies and sunshine. When Colt and JTJ arrived a few minutes later, they were astonished because they had driven through flooded streets and a hailstorm to get here. The first guests arrived at one. Kids went into the pool. Older folks hung out on the back porch or in the gazebo.

Everything went swimmingly until 4:45 when an amazing flash of lightning and crack of thunder sent the swimmers bailing from the pool. What followed was the promised torrential downpour. The remainder of the party was spent with people making use of the fireplace in the Gazebo and the overhead heaters on the back porch.

At the point in the party, Jeanne T. came into the family room where Bill and I were busy staying out of the way while binge-watching Downton Abbey on Netflix.

“Do you remember the first event we had in this house?” she asked.

Bill and I allowed as how we remembered that very well, and what followed was a few moments of quiet tears of which the other guests were totally unaware.

For ease of coming and going, we had left the sliders on the patio open most of the day. As guests were leaving, I noticed that there was one of our wild birds who was obviously taking serious exception to the proceedings. Then as Jeanne T. and the last two guests walked through the living room, they discovered why the bird was so distressed. He had flown in at some point during the party and was now trapped in our living room—a room with a fourteen-foot high ceiling.

This was not my first trapped bird rodeo. I went out to the pool and brought in the long-handled skimmer. We put a towel over the working end of that. Finally, once the terrified bird landed on the towel, JTJ was able to lower the skimmer out through the open slider immediately underneath where the bird had been perched, making it a happy ending for all concerned.

I’m sure there will be more celebrations in this house, but these two seemed especially meaningful—like closing a circle. The rain came eventually, but it wasn’t enough to spoil the fun.

But maybe that’s the whole point of circles. Good and bad. Bright and dark. Sun and rain. Winter and summer. Sorrow and happiness. Life and death.

All we have to do is keep on rolling along.

Oh, and never say never.

Judy & Colt

PS. Again, if the photo isn’t visible, please send me a note at jajance@me.com