Belltown Messenger - Documenting Downtown Seattle

city girl

MARY LOU SANELLI prepares for post-equinoxal life
Seasonal Affective Dreams

I have only to lay my eyes on how the sun creeps lower in the sky, and I can feel myself deflating.

Now the daydreams start coming, every day, like clockwork. In one, I fly to Greece for the winter. In another, to Hawaii.

In a fit of defiance, or maybe just desperation, I walk outside in my flimsy nightgown. And there, sitting on my deck high above Vine Street, I drink a cup of coffee as if I'm perched on a private lanai. And I know this sounds hopelessly vain, but while willing myself to appreciate every bit of warmth still emanating from an apres-summer sky, my thoughts, instead, are of what my neighbor will see when he steps out onto his balcony to smoke his first cigarette of the day. Because I'm not sitting here wrapped in some illusion that all women look beautiful half-naked first thing in the morning... Sometimes I miss having a backyard. I had one once, love them still, but I'll probably never have one again. Instead, I visit my friends who have them, listen to them complain about the upkeep and lie around on a chaise lounge while they water the shrubs.

And when my yard-nostalgia starts to give equal time to house-longing, I think about a conversation I had with a friend who is building her "dream house" on Whidbey Island. Naturally, the whole thing is costing three times what she thought it would, which can turn a dream into a nightmare pretty quickly. I took her hands in mine. I wanted to say that dreams come from within us, not houses, there are no such short cuts. I wanted to say this, but I didn't. Of course I have our city's dream, the Sculpture Park, as my back yard, right? I do love to walk there if only to hear people's reaction to the... well, even if a lot of us can't bring ourselves to call some of the pieces "sculpture," there's plenty of grass and trees and rules about what we can and can't do, which makes me feel right at home, as if plunked down in my dad's dream of the perfect New England back yard where we weren't allowed to play for fear we'd mar the lawn or fall into a cherished rose bed. That's the thing about public art. All this attention to art-by-committee while working artists are priced out of town? I think substituting public art for a charitable commitment to artists creates more alienation between a city and its artists rather than less.

Still, the whole dream of a sculpture park is a grand one, no?. And any attempt to improve ourselves by fulfilling a dream is a good thing even if-and this is where the whole thing muddles-the word "improve" means something distinctly different to everyone.

There's a man, new to our building, who shared his dream with me. I can't recount the exact conversation for you, only how I remember it, how he dreamed of being a part of our "close-knit Belltown community."

It occurred to me to laugh out loud. Or to say how we mostly keep to ourselves this side of Denny rather than mingle. And that our walls are too near together for such a closely-knit dream. See, our proximity demands we live further apart. I also thought of saying that real friends take a lifetime to build and community is only what we make of it.

It's just that I don't like to spill on people's dreams. Dreams help our jaded ends meet in a brighter middle. People don't want to be afraid of what others will tell them about their dreams.

Case in point: There was a time when my dream was to live in a tiny shack in the foothills of Sequim forever. There I was, a haughty little hippie-girl, living in the woods with no electricity or running water. I would have hated my friends telling me, while I was blissfully wallpapering the outhouse, that, sooner or later, I'd tire of the whole au naturel fantasy and buy a condo in Seattle.

I hated their reality check even more if they'd warned me that my wood-rotten privy would buckle over. Or that, years later, the plywood would vanish, along with any sign of our shared past.

First published in The Queen Anne News. Sanelli's latest book is Falling Awake.