I don’t really know how I decided to leave Seattle. I just know that after Lauren and her boyfriend Moses said they were leaving and that they had a plan to be gone by March 1, it seemed silly for me to stay. They had lived with me through the pandemic lockdown and we had made a really sweet home together, but once they were gone, I’d be home alone, since Erin went to college in Chicago and stayed there. For some reason, it didn't seem to matter that I'd lived in Seattle for the last 27 years, that my kids were born and raised there, that I had made a life there. So many people had fallen away after the divorce, and without any kids in school anymore, many of my communities were gone. What did I really have tying me to that city anymore?
In March of 2021, I flew to Southern California to help Lauren and Moses move in to their new place and spent a few days getting them settled in. When I flew back to Seattle, I stopped at the grocery store on my way home and, although it was my local store and I knew it like the back of my hand, I found myself wandering the aisles with an empty cart, utterly lost. I texted the kids a photo of the cart and the caption: I have no idea what to buy at the grocery store. What do I eat? I’m so used to getting food for you guys. This is weird. I realized that I had never in my life lived alone. Ever.
Within a matter of days I was telling people that I wanted to sell my house and move. It seemed impulsive and crazy, but also imminently doable. It was as if I had been picked up by a giant swell while I was floating in the ocean and I was just trusting it to take me to some new, glorious place. I know I wasn't the only one - during the lockdown so many people discovered they could work from anywhere so long as they had an internet connection. Why not think about where I wanted to live, really wanted to live?
That was around the time when my brain decided it would wake me up every morning at 5:26am. No matter what time I’d gone to bed the night before, my eyes would pop open and my brain turned on at 5:26 every morning. Even when it was still dark outside. The dogs were surprised, but happy to follow me downstairs for an earlier breakfast than usual, and then the little one, Chivito, would go out to pee and head right back upstairs to bed until the sun rose.
I began sitting in the living room with an empty spiral notebook, writing Morning Pages a la Julia Cameron, dumping out all of my thoughts about the move onto the page. Would I miss this place? I would certainly miss certain things – walking in the Arboretum, knowing where everything was in the neighborhood, driving across 520 on a sunny, clear day and gawking at Mount Rainier in the distance, looming over the end of the lake. I tacked up a huge blank piece of butcher paper on the wall and began fantasizing about the qualities of a place that was calling me to settle there. When new ideas came to mind, I jotted them down. Close to nature. Small, connected community. Walkable neighborhood. Airport close by. Mild weather. I let myself dream without restrictions, finding the things that were most important and knowing that being accessible to my kids was key.
One thing I wouldn’t miss was the food bank, and I felt guilty about it. I’d volunteered at my neighborhood food bank every week for five years and made some really lovely friends there. But when the pandemic lockdown was put in place in March of 2020, any small frustrations I’d had about the way it all worked exploded like mushroom clouds in the sky. Our food bank was small, but it was enormously impactful. In the heart of the Central District, we were visited by a diverse population of folks: women and children living in domestic violence shelters and transitional housing provided by the YWCA, unhoused folks – both those living in tents in the parks and in their cars, undocumented immigrants and refugees providing for multigenerational households, people of all cultures and races and speaking many different languages. Like every other food bank in the city, we received the standard fare from the big non-profit clearinghouses – pasta, rice, dried and canned beans, canned soup, peanut butter, and boxed cereal and lots and lots of soda. We also had the option to use discretionary funds (mostly donated by individuals, but also some grant money) to purchase specific items that we knew our clients would like such as stuffing mix at Thanksgiving or tortillas and shredded cheese. We had milk and butter and eggs from time to time but struggled to get olive oil or spices and things that made cooking easier. We also tried to have a variety of things available that didn’t require cooking for folks who didn’t have any way to cook.
A local church congregation donated fresh produce every week and sometimes we were able to request specific items. The East Asian families loved garlic and scallions and leafy greens. Families with small children were always looking for bananas and apples. We ran the food bank like a grocery store, letting everyone choose the items they wanted as they moved through. As someone with a severe gluten allergy, I often lamented the lack of items that were shelf-stable for folks like me and wondered how families with specific dietary needs managed. And the more I talked to our regular clients, the more I realized the things we didn’t have; tampons, diapers, baby food, pain relievers. Occasionally, a mother would come through hoping to find cupcakes so she could treat her child on their birthday. Once or twice, I found a cake mix, but without eggs and milk and oil and a pan that was the right size, it was hard to make that work. The Covid lockdown made everything harder.
For one thing, we could no longer have clients come to us. We were forced into a delivery model which meant that we had to scramble to find volunteers to drive every single week. That also meant that if you didn’t have an address, you couldn’t get any food from a food bank anymore. The number of unhoused folks living in tents in parks all around Seattle exploded in 2020, and yet none of those people were allowed to come to a food bank and be served. Within weeks, the National Guard was delivering truckloads of food to us that was essentially useless. With restaurants closed down, big companies like Sysco had warehouses full of gallon-size cans of water chestnuts and mandarin oranges and bamboo shoots, so they were donating them to food banks. We were no longer able to order items we wanted – we were simply supposed to receive whatever was delivered to us and use it. And we couldn’t personalize boxes for individual households – with the explosion in the number of people who needed food from us, we simply had to mass produce boxes of food that were exactly the same for each and every house on the list every single week. I went from working four or five hours a week to four or five hours a day four days a week or more, receiving, coordinating deliveries, organizing and inventorying items, prepping the menu for that week’s boxes, scheduling volunteers to fill the boxes and load the delivery cars, and cleaning up. It was exhausting, disheartening work.
Who needs a three pound can of mandarin oranges? And even if you wanted it, once you open it, you have to find a way to store the remainder so it doesn’t go bad. Many of our families in transitional housing only had a small, dorm-style refrigerator and that enormous can took up half of the space inside. Every week, we were giving away cans like this – green beans or baby corn – along with a pound of dry pasta, two cans of tuna, a can of beans, a bag of dried beans, a jar of peanut butter, a bag of rice, a stick of butter, a pint of shelf-stable milk, and a can of fruit cocktail. Every single week. I don’t know about you, but I can’t eat an entire jar of peanut butter every week. Within three weeks, we noticed folks starting to refuse deliveries or trade their delivery driver a half-full box from the previous week for their new box that week. Most of the food we were distributing was getting thrown out or wasted.
We often had meat to give as well, but unlike before, when people could choose what they wanted, now they simply got whatever we gave them. The result of this ranged from the simply absurd – giving a whole, raw chicken to someone in transitional housing whose only means of cooking was a small microwave oven – to the patently offensive such as when, during Ramadan, the federal government distributed thousands of pounds of pork tenderloin and bacon to us as our only protein options and we were forced to either throw it away or send it to our Muslim and Jewish families.
Just down the street from my house a few blocks was a small park that, seemingly overnight, sprouted a tent city. Most weeks, when we were finished with deliveries and I was there cleaning up alone, I hunted through our stock of things for single-serving cereal boxes, pouches of tuna, juice boxes, granola bars, and crackers and I filled box after box along with any remaining carrots or apples or bananas and dropped them at the tent city. It wasn’t these folks’ fault that they didn’t have an address for delivery. Pulling up, I would recruit one of the folks who was living there to help me unload my car and go “knock” on their neighbors’ tents to let them know there was food available.
Week after week this continued and while the volunteers did our best to pivot and raise private funds for additional items and be as thoughtful as we could about what we could give to folks in their boxes that would help, I got increasingly enraged. I read that Governor Inslee had earmarked $5 million for food banks in the state during the pandemic and I started contacting my city and county and state representatives. I wanted us to use that money to give directly to folks who needed it – not spend it on food that many of them didn’t or couldn’t use. Everyone I spoke to seemed appropriately horrified by my tales of waste and inefficiency, but nobody wanted to help. If we had simply given that money to the food banks to distribute to their clients, each of those people could have used it to shop in their own neighborhood shops and farmers’ markets, supporting their neighbors, and getting what they needed to survive, rather than being expected to survive on whatever some faceless non-profit worker decided they should eat. Even my most progressive local lawmaker suggested I “put together a coalition of food bank volunteers and employees to study the issue and make a recommendation.” People were dying. We didn't have months to study the issue.
I gave up trying to help through existing channels. I continued to appropriate food from the food bank after hours to take to the tent cities. I was contacted by a local mutual aid group that served indigenous families and arranged to meet someone on Saturday mornings and let them “shop” for what they needed. They took rice and cheese and dried beans and produce to make big batch meals to serve to their community. I started to feel a little better. Someone from that group told another person in the Cambodian community that I might be able to help them and we made a similar arrangement, except that these folks were mostly elders who cooked in the traditional ways – with lemongrass and ginger and fish sauce. I took what I could for them from the food bank and then reached out to my network and asked for cash donations. Once a month, I sent Lauren and Moses to the Asian grocery store to stock up on bok choy and lemongrass and ginger and chicken and then we drove down to South Seattle to unload. We were keeping people alive, but it shouldn’t have been that hard.
I loved my fellow volunteers at the food bank and they spent many hours listening to me rant and agreeing with me and trying to help in their own ways, but ultimately, I knew when I left Seattle, I wouldn’t ever volunteer in another food bank. This system wasn’t set up to help people in any substantive, sustainable way. It would only ever be run top-down by a bunch of bureaucrats who thought they knew better than the folks who were going hungry. I imagined that this move would give me the opportunity to really embrace a different way of thinking about non-profit organizations and how to gauge whether or not they actually did the kind of good I wanted to be a part of.
I wrote about all of the other things I was hoping to find in my new place – a sense of community, meaningful work, new family traditions. It felt exciting and full of possibility to imagine starting over completely and that’s when I formed the idea of giving away all of my furniture.
My house was fully furnished for a large family – living and family rooms with couches as well as the loft upstairs, bedrooms with desks and dressers and full-size beds. What if I only kept the things I really really loved and gave away the rest? I contacted a transitional housing program for domestic violence victims and arranged for them to come take away truckloads of furniture.
I listed my house with a realtor who enthusiastically assured me that it would sell almost overnight, and waited. It didn’t. Weeks passed, we had open houses and a few showings, but there were no offers. The realtor was baffled and I was starting to second-guess myself. The kids were safely tucked away in their new lives in Los Angeles and I was here alone, pacing and wringing my hands and wondering if I’d just really screwed up. I felt trapped.
“I feel trapped!” I wailed to my friend Thereza on the phone one day as I walked back and forth across the newly shampooed rug in my bedroom. “I don’t want to be here. I’ve already quit the food bank, told everyone I’m moving, given away most of my stuff. My head and heart are not in Seattle anymore. I am itchy – uncomfortable in my own skin. I need this to happen.”
“You aren’t trapped. You can go. You don’t have to be there for the house to sell. In fact, the energy you’re dumping into the house by staying there might be the reason it’s not selling. What if you just left?”
I stopped moving. I didn’t breathe. What if I just left?
The next day, I sold my electric car back to the dealership. I rented a van, tucked my daughter’s pet tortoise and my two rescue dogs and my biggest suitcase into the back and drove away. My plan was to meander my way down through Oregon, stopping at the coast for a night and again in Ashland, make my way to San Francisco and then eventually to my cousin’s house in Los Angeles where the dogs and I would reassess. As I backed out of the sloping driveway one last time, I started to shake. What the fuck was I doing?
I am safe.
I am loved.
I have resources.
I deserve joy.
Every time I started to freak out, I repeated those four lines. I was hoping to eventually believe them, but for now it was enough to say them. At one point, as I merged on to the freeway heading South, I realized I had a big grin on my face. I wasn’t trapped. I was leaving.
I’ve always known that Thereza is some kind of benevolent
witch, and once again it was confirmed. Four hours after leaving my house in Seattle, I got a voice mail from my realtor. When I stopped in Portland to pee and let the dogs out, I listened to it and whooped out loud. “Hey, Kari, call me when you get a minute. We have a cash offer on your house and they want to close in 30 days.”