It doesn’t get much better than ‘Near Perfect’

Near Nature. Near Perfect.

Words meant to entice visitors and new residents to the city of Spokane.

Recently, I sat with business owners, media representatives and people from the community as the Spokane Convention and Visitors Bureau formally launched its new promotional DVD.

Watching the beautiful scenery, smiling faces and unabashed cheerleading, all showing the best Spokane has to offer, I was reminded of the anxious hours I spent studying the city’s relocation package before moving here in 1999.

I read the statistics – days of sunlight, inches of snow, average temperatures and the all-important economic data – and measured Spokane’s proximity to so many of the natural wonders I wanted to show my children.

I dog-eared the pages of real-estate brochures, circling potential homes, and filled a three-ring binder with important information about schools, crime statistics and whatever else I could find.

I didn’t take anything lightly. It all mattered too much.

To remind me, I keep a little pillow that is stitched with the words, “Bloom Where You’re Planted.” It was a gift from a friend after she read a column I wrote just before our move.

I had been transplanting flowers into big pots by the front door of our house, a house that would soon be sold, and as I gently lifted the fragile seedlings out of the cups in which they had grown, careful not to damage their delicate roots, I thought about my four young children, and how I was, in a sense, doing the same thing to them.

I wrote that pulling tender shoots from the only soil they had ever known and replanting them into a new place was a scary thing. But I was sure that with enough time and love, and with careful tending, my family would thrive.

And, ultimately, we did.

For the most part, the city has lived up to the image presented in the brochures I studied so carefully. The weather has been friendly, the people comfortable and the schools excellent.

We’ve settled in, but we didn’t grow like weeds cast into a field by the wind.

I had to cultivate our new life.

The last six years haven’t always been easy. For the first two, I was in a maternal crisis, hovering, concerned and anxious to get my family established.

I spent another couple of years cloistered at home alone, working early in the morning and late into the night, serious and determined to build the career I had put off for so long. It was isolating and exhausting.

It has only been in the last two years that I’ve stretched my own wings and allowed myself the freedom to explore.

Now, like so many others who have moved here in the past, and continue to arrive, I’ve discovered that Spokane suits me.

There is a fine sense of possibility here.

A few days after I watched the new DVD designed to show Spokane at its best, I put on my coat, slipped an apple in my pocket and went for a walk across the newly refurbished Monroe Street Bridge.

Resting my palms on the cold cement of the bridge, looking down at the rushing water below, feeling the cool mist settle on my face, I realized for the first time that the landscape, the churning water spilling over jagged rocks, the mountains on the horizon and the solid, old, genteel, buildings lining the downtown streets, has become familiar to me. It feels like home.

And wouldn’t you know, in that instant the clouds parted.

I felt the warmth of the winter sun reach through me, all the way to the tender roots I’ve put down into the rocky soil of this place.

Life in Spokane, or anywhere else for that matter, isn’t perfect. But right here, right now, it’s near enough.