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I grew up in a neighborhood called Richmond Beach. Its in a district called Shoreline. Ten years ago Shoreline was made its own city. When I was little we lived twelve minutes from down town Seattle. Now we can get to Seattle in twelve minutes if we travel between two and five in the morning; every other hour the traffic has grown so bad that it takes closer to thirty.  My parents moved to Shoreline nineteen years ago from Denver because my dad wanted to raise his kids in the Pacific Northwest. Twenty years ago Shoreline was well known for an impeccable public school system. Since then, the superintendent of the school district embezzled some 1.7 million dollars from the school system and what was once a top ranked public school district is now a capital for oxycotin and narcotic abuse.

One hundred years ago, Richmond Beach was a gigantic strawberry patch on the edge of the Puget Sound. Before that it was the land of Snohomish, Duwamish and Suquamish American Indians. My high school mascot was the Thunderbird. We had totem poles in front of our school... but I didn't know many people with indian blood. There is a large Mormon community in Shoreline, a ton of Scandinavians (historically came here for the fishing... of which there is less and less)  and most of those of African descent are Eritrean and Ethiopian. There is vietnamese Pho restaurants on every corner in my town.  Every time I go home there are more condominiums being built up and more trees being cut down. 

I have no idea what the future holds for a city like Shoreline and its amazing to think about all the change its underwent since I've lived there. Its always bitter sweet to go back. But its my home. And a great blue heron has built its nest in the douglas fir in my parent's back yard and the cherry trees still blossom the first week of may and I still can't walk down the street without running into someone who has known me since i was five.  But more then anything else, I've never been anywhere else nestled between two mountain ranges on a beach in the woods facing West and that edge of this continent is where my roots are.