have yourself a metropolitan christmas

I'm staying in Queen Anne and I hesitate to say "alone" because, well, I'm not. Although I'm not surrounded by family as usual, I'm staying with Willie. He and I just returned from metropolitan market (and yes, they spell it with all lowercase letters in century gothic font) to buy some firewood.

It seems so unnatural to be buying firewood. Wood is not something for which you go into a grocery store. You don't stroll through the deli section to pick up a log shrink-wrapped in plastic. Firewood does not come with directions. Firewood comes by the cord, a pile delivered in early fall, twenty feet long and a dozen feet high. The pieces need to be chopped by hand, and until they are, little mice and lizards take up residency between the planks. Firewood is carried in from the cold, snowy outside in a black canvas sling that always trails assorted leaves and bark from the door to the fireplace. Sometimes the wood screams and pops because it is still damp with snow. Wood does not cost $4.79 plus tax.

We sashay to Queen Anne Center, Willie and me, in a very urban fashion, using cross-walks, passing three Starbucks on the way. My hands are soft and lily-white, ten long winters away from wood delivered by the plank to a colonial home in New England. This is the West Coast. I am metropolitan now. With a small "m".

Back at the house, I kneel on the cold tile in front of the enormous fireplace that dominates the room and free the log from its plastic sheath. It is peeled and sterile, homogenous; no bark, no leaves, no mice. I place it on the wrought iron grill and light it. The log has its own wick. Inside the fireplace this single lonely log looks like a mere pencil. But it's warm and the wrapper assures me it will burn for five long hours. Willie has wasted no time; he is sprawled and snoozing on the oriental carpet, basking in the golden glow of our Duraflame®, one ear cocked to the crackling of pressure-treated wood, paws ladling the air as he dreams about chasing a certain rabbit.

Every so often the log turns over, sending a shower of sparks upwards toward the flue, startling me slightly and reminding me that I'm grateful to be in the city where fire trucks are only a few blocks away.

Although they did not plan on spending Christmas in their house, my friends got a tree so I'd have something festive to wake up to on Christmas. It's two and a half feet tall and sprinkled with colored lights. I have arranged my gifts beneath the tree. I forced myself to leave most of them wrapped. It has been an exercise in sheer willpower.

The house crowns Queen Anne, with the whole city tumbling at her feet. Life is easy in this house, organic and airy. Honey hardwood floors and exposed brick, down blankets, floor to ceiling windows framing Elliott Bay. I stayed here my first night in Seattle. Shea and I arrived in the middle of the night. Mark took us out on the porch. "We have a nice view. Basically, anywhere you don't see lights is water," he told us, making a sweeping gesture left to right at the dark landscape. Oh -- and mountains. He forgot to tell us about the mountains. When I awoke in this city I now call home, I slid out in the morning sunshine to the porch and realized how high up we were. He was right. The Bay for miles, hugged by the snowy peaks of the Olympics.

I think about that night a lot. What it was like to wake up here for the first time. In this city, in this house. Feeling like I'd finally made it home. I remember what it smelled like, what the air felt like. The possibilities, the energy still runs up my spine when I'm here. This place is magical.

Our fire is roaring now, and Willie still snoozes while I muse about my affection for Queen Anne. The nooks and surprised alleyway gardens, the stairs built into the sidewalks so you don't fall down the steep street, the sides of buildings covered gently in a breath of moss -- the leafless trees, too -- so they look like they're made of aging copper. The tangled growth hanging from towering trees, where the vines lining the sidewalk lift up to the branches above, forming a wall of green along the damp streets with flowers accidentally peeking through the spaces. Wind chimes, bird baths, mosaic stairways, stone statues, the people who say good morning to you on the street, a park on every corner, smothered in life -- all of it perched at the top of Queen Anne Ave., with slopes so steep they don't dare put a stop light on it. The Queen Anne Ave. I saw as I pulled off the highway for the first time, lugging the u-Haul with everything I own in it, Shea on the phone taking directions from Mark. I remember how we turned that corner and found ourselves at the foot of Queen Anne Ave., the steepest paved incline I had ever seen in my life, and I was sure we weren't going to make it up. We were going to tip over backwards and roll right down because there was no way these four cylinders were going to get us up that hill. The hill that people were slalom skiing down during the freak snowstorm last year. But we made it. And I think about that every single time I pass under the monorail and stop at the foot of Lower Queen Anne.

That thought is usually followed closely by the memory of the truck stop payphone in Wyoming, where I danced from one bare foot to the other because the dusty sidewalk was so hot, and there was a starving young dog milling about as a dirty, sunburnt guy in a pickup truck fed him Reese's peanut butter cups through the window. We were hundreds of miles from cell phone service, and I was lining up quarters along the top of the payphone and squinting in the harsh light. The people at this truck stop made me truly nervous. I feared for my life. I left a hasty message on Mark's answering machine: "This is Kristin, from Boston, um... I'm in Wyoming I think, we'll be in Seattle soon, give me a call if we can still crash with you." I had never spoken to him before, got his number from my friend's sister's boyfriend who told me he was a great person who would me up when I got to Seattle, if I needed it. So I showed up at his door at midnight on a Tuesday with Shea in tow and an unannounced bunny.

We lived in Mark and Lori's house for a week while I looked for an apartment and wore the same suit to three interviews. They fed us and gave us maps and gave us the key to their house without second thought, saying they would be absolutely offended if we didn't take whatever we needed. We should make ourselves at home.

And now on Christmas Eve, I am. In this magical little house on Queen Anne, where six months ago I stumbled from a car that had just done 3,000 miles to the new city I call home. The log turns over, sending shooting stars to dance on the exposed brick, and Willie turns over in his sleep, remembering the first time this crazy girl brought a fat rabbit into the house that he wasn't allowed to chase.