Washington Park Arboretum Archives - Ann Hedreen, Writer Teacher Filmmaker

A Kind of September

On the first day of September, 2020, I turned my head at just the right moment and saw an owl, still as a portrait, on a branch over a teardrop of a pond in the Arboretum. It was noon. The owl was enjoying the shade, and did not care to move, even after a whispering clutch of onlookers gathered to snap photos on their phones. We were mesmerized by the owl’s patient gaze; by its obliviousness to our restless human need to marvel at its composure. It seemed a good omen of a kind of September: when we could try to remember, as in the old song, when life was slow and oh, so mellow. But no: if the owl was an omen, that was not its message. Seems to me a screaming blue-jay would have been a better harbinger of the fires, floods, pestilence, grief, corruption and mud-slinging that lay in store for us, way back on September 1. On the other hand: maybe the owl in the Arboretum was the right omen for the job. Maybe the owl’s message was: Don’t flail. Find your branch, and stay still like me. We’ll ride this month out, together. Easy for me to say. I did not have to evacuate a home that was about to burn or flood. I did not have to rush to the ER, short of breath. I do not anticipate having my vote rejected. In September 2020, my job turned out to be an owl’s job after all: stay still. Shut out the [...]

Spring Fever

therestlessnest2019-11-07T15:47:56-08:00Categories: hiking, midlife, nature, Seattle|Tags: spring fever, Washington Park Arboretum|

What a great day it was to have five working senses. My nose might’ve had it the best: from coffee to strawberries, lavender, mint and, topping the list, dirt. I wallowed in it like a three-year-old in a sandbox: scooping wet compost into my garden bed, raking it, poking holes, patting seedlings into place. Rainbow chard, Merlot lettuce, Dinosaur kale: day one for this year’s 2 feet by 4 feet vegetable kingdom. Reach high, seedlings! Shake off that greenhouse gloom: you are outside now, kids, and every day, we’re all going to get a few more minutes of this golden light. My husband and I started our Spring Fever Saturday with a long tromp through the Washington Park Arboretum. For two hours, we were the greenhouse transplants, stretching into warmth and light. Spring in Seattle is like that: everyone turns into happy seedlings, faces pointed skyward, toes in the mud. Or maybe we’re more like a tribe of Munchkins, blinking and wide-eyed as we obey the urging of the sun to come out, come out, wherever we are. The Arboretum trails were thronged with strolling birders and blossom-lovers, painters with easels all along Azalea Way, runners and rubber-booted families in the marshes of Foster Island. What an old friend of a landscape this is for me, I thought as we sat and put our boots back on after wading across a submerged bit of the Foster Island trail. On suddenly warm spring days just like this one, I used to come down here on my bike [...]