Seattle's Spawn

I love this time of year. Salmon are spawning right outside my windows. I awaken in the ash-colored morning to see them twirling between tree boughs. Normally pink, these sockeye and coho are now bright red. Their once rounded noses are needle-shaped, serving as tools for shaping the riverbed into nests. Eggs are deposited and male partners whip their tails in frenzied circles to cover the nests with soil. Once done with their life's task, the salmon float into and are trapped by the rushes at the rivers' edge where they become one with the river.

It is the marvelous annual journey in a four-year cycle to create life that nourishes and feeds all of the life in this diverted branch of a river that is barely in the suburbs. Less than a mile from Seattle, there are whiting, otter, beavers, snakes, freshwater crab, kingfishers, eagles. Underwater plants.

Things that live under the rocks.

And beautiful, beautiful trees. It’s a great place to live. And it's Fall. Autumn. This wonderful season that smells so beautifully of the decay of change. The river’s life is being replenished. Good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise (really, weather has changed and we are now in the flood plains), it will repeat next year. And give me hope that, no matter how much the world changes, some things are, at least for now, constant.