Morning, in the Treehouse

The first morning in Seattle I woke up at five. It had been windy the night before, the tall evergreen tree outside the bedroom window whipping about wildly. By the time I woke up the winds had died down and it was just beginning to grow light.

I do not usually wake up this early. I do not usually wake up early at all. I especially do not usually wake up early the morning after a 14-hour drive, but I was too excited to stay in bed. I tiptoed down the stairs feeling like a kid on Christmas morning.

We call this house the Treehouse. It’s fairly nondescript, the most modern house I have ever lived in, almost entirely lacking in personality. But there is a view, and the view makes it all worthwhile. Here, a mere few miles from downtown Seattle, there is a view of trees and green. And that morning I watched as dawn broke over a ridge of pine trees, looking out at a million shades of green.



Okay, so dawn didn’t so much "break." This is Seattle, after all, it was overcast. There was more of a gradual lightening taking place, but it was beautiful.

There is a chair that I love in the Treehouse, tucked in a corner by the window. And it’s here that I curled up, with my cup of tea, and watched the patches of sunlight advance across the room.



This is not the sort of morning I usually have. Most mornings I am on the computer within ten minutes of waking up. I am knee-deep in email by the time the teakettle boils—that’s if I remember to put it on. Many days I don’t even look up from the screen until my stomach rumbles. Sometimes that’s noon or one in the afternoon, other days it can be as late as three. The dark side of working at home is that the work is always there, it’s so easy to get sucked into the long list of things that need to be done, read, responded to before you even shower, get dressed, have a cup of tea.

But there is no internet connection here in the Treehouse, it’s not hooked up yet. So instead I sat, and I read a magazine, and I watched the sunlight march across the floor. I listened to the birds in the trees outside, and I drank my tea and nibbled on a slice of Spanish fig almond “cake” that I had bought in a market in Oregon. And I thought that this is what I had come for, to take a step back from the habits and patterns I’ve developed—many of them unconscious—that are no longer making me feel happy or healthy. I want my mornings back, I want the time to clear my head and have a moment before my attention is taken up by the world and all that I have to do.

I want a cup of tea and a patch of sunlight and a moment of peace before the day begins.



But of course my life is online, hard to fight that these days, and by noon I was settled in a cafe—Victrola on 15th Avenue in Capitol Hill. This stretch of small businesses is one of my favorite spots. It’s not far from the Treehouse, and the trip through the tree-lined streets of the backside of Capitol Hill always takes my breath away. For an amateur architecture buff, Seattle is a lovely city—leafy neighborhoods of vintage houses, carefully tended yards, a slice of a life so seemingly sweet that it’s hard to not want to move in and stay forever. The architectural details alone win my heart over.



Victrola is the sort of café that wins me over as well. My tea comes in a small French press on it’s own little tray. My current favorite is Colonille, listed on the menu as “Frensh Vanilla and Vietnamese Black Tea.” I don’t know if that’s meant to be “French” vanilla or “Fresh” vanilla, but either way I am sold. It adds the slightest richness to the tea—not an overtly vanilla flavor, just a mellowness, rounding it out.



And I sit at the table with a slate top, looking out at a row of old fashioned lawn chairs that will eventually be filled with people from the neighborhood relaxing, chatting, catching up, running into each other. And I suppose I live close enough to sort of consider this my neighborhood—it’s a little bit of a stretch but not too much.

My neighborhood, I kind of like that.




For those keeping track, yes, that is three cups of tea before one—but you have no idea how much coffee they drink in this place, I'm just trying to keep up!