Prompt 1: Where did you grow up?

I haven't done much writing recently, so I decided to do what my friend Emily recently did and write based on prompts. Emily used a list she found, but she didn't like one of the prompts, so instead for that day she decided to make up her own list of prompts. I told her I thought that was great and that maybe I'd do the 30 day blogging thing using her prompts, and she told me that was a great idea and I should do it. So here is me doing just that. Click here to find the full list of prompts. But here's the first one:

1. Where did you grow up? Share some memories...

Born in Europe, raised in America. Well, some of the raising happened in Europe too, I guess. I was born in Naples, Italy but spent my toddler years in Rickmansworth, UK, just outside of London. That's where my first memories come from. But I didn't really "grow up" in England. I grew up in Bothell, WA. Thinking about Washington, I get hit by that inability to write or do anything, that unwillingness to get started that I get when I'm confronted by the massiveness of a certain topic or project. It's because you think there's a lot you could say, but you're afraid you won't be able to do it justice, so you sort of just give up on it. Well, that's what I do, at least.

I could talk about Europe, but I think I'll pick Western Washington, because let's face it, I didn't do much growing in Europe. Europe is like this collage of impressions that I have from our red brick house in Rickmansworth, with its big backyard and apple trees that I used to climb. That, plus the trips around the island and the continent that my family went on. I'd never known anything other than Europe, but I probably picked up on the fact that we were doing something momentous from my older siblings and parents. Great place to have one's early childhood, btw.

When I was four, my family moved to Bothell, WA, and a lot of the memories of my childhood feel like this:

Olympic Peninsula, WA

Bothell is an average-sized municipal area that is part of the urban sprawl that creeps north from Seattle. It's twenty minutes away from the ocean, thirty minutes from Seattle, and maybe forty-five minutes away from the closest mountains. As weird as it sounds, I am very proud to hail from Bothell. It's a great place. Sadly, it's getting a little crowded these days. When I was a kid, there was a massive blueberry farm-thing (not sure what you call those) about five minutes from our house. Now it's a Fred Meyer. Speaking of berries, the Pacific Northwest is a goldmine for delicious berries. Especially blackberries. They grow everywhere, they are probably Washington state's official state weed. After church my friends and I would hide from our parents, climbing trees and stuffing our faces with sweet, massive blackberries. And if you head east to the Cascade Range, you're sure to find plenty of salmonberries alongside the forest trails, which are also delicious, despite looking like unripe blackberries.

Salmonberries, courtesy of Wikipedia.

My sense of place for Bothell, and by extension the Pacific Northwest, mostly evokes trees, mountains, and rocky beaches littered with driftwood and bull kelp. I like it that way. I'd rather think of it that way than what it seems to be becoming. Bothell itself is now quite... suburban. My backyard growing up, filled with lots of dirt and tall trees, was actually a vacant lot that someone decided to build a house on when I was a teenager. So gone went the little fort that my brother, the neighbor kids and I built around the enormous stump of an old-growth tree. Another nearby forest that my friends and I used to play in was chopped down to make room for homes, homes, and more homes. They take these little plots of land and just cram homes into them, with little alleys between them that serve as yard space. People gotta live close to the interstate, I guess.

Some of the most undervalued (by me) memories at the time were the big summer adventure trips that I did when I was teenager/Boy Scout. When I was fourteen, I biked about a 200 mile stretch of the Oregon coast, from Astoria to Florence. I don't think I've ever played a more epic game of capture the flag than on the crazy landscape of the sand dunes outside Florence. When I was fifteen I did a 50 mile canoe trip down Lake Roosevelt (which is the dammed up part of the Columbia River on the other side of the Grand Coulee Dam). When I was sixteen I did a 50 mile hike through Mt. Baker National Park, north Cascades. When I was seventeen, I did a 50 mile canoe trip at Ross Lake. And when I was 18, I did a 250 or so mile bike trip from somewhere in Montana to Spokane. I think it's time for a couple throwback pictures:

Lake Roosevelt canoe trip. Courtesy of Facebook.

North Cascades 50 mile hike. Courtesy of Facebook.

I had some pretty bad hair for a long time. Now I have no hair. Karma. Anyway, the point is that I got to experience the incredible nature that the Pacific Northwest has to offer, and I'm grateful for it. Now that I'm a "grown-up" I wish I could do that sort of thing more often, but I lack the funds and the time.

The last little memory I want to share: rain. Bothell is a pretty rainy place, although it really does have its fair share of sunny days too. But I remember more times than I can count sitting on a cold school bus, drawing in the condensation on the windows; hiking in a cold, wet forest, endless drops of water dripping from trees and green ferns; grey clouds and a brisk wind keeping me cool as I played outside.

This was fun. I enjoyed this little exercise in talking about place and what it means to me. Okay. I've said where I grew up, and I've shared some memories. I think I'll call it a day.