#ballard

Okay so May.

Right?

We kicked it off with a bit of summer enjoyment, walking along the lake, enjoying the peace, enjoying the sounds of everyone at the lake, stopping in at Tapster and enjoying drink samples on their patio under a setting sun.

I won't lie. Being present in such moments, fully experiencing them, the feel of the sun and the light breeze, the sound of everyone enjoying this moment, the taste of the drinks, the smell of cooking food, the light and color and scenery all around us, and sharing in all of this together...

Is a thoroughly compelling experience.

I said in previous posts that no month is ever about one thing. It never is.

However.

Because some months are so indellibly stamped by an experience, those months are preserved in our minds as being about that one thing. For example, March was the one with Jordan & Dean. May... was the one in which we helped my parents move. And one of the byproducts of doing that is the discovery of thousands of photographs we either hadn't seen in a long, long time or...

Had never seen at all.

There's definitely serious family history in this treasure trove easily going back to the late 1930s.

There's also that time my folks took us on a family vacation to Disney World where we all stayed in the Animal Kingdom Lodge and Linzy embarked on a quest to accumulate Disney character signatures.

She was really very good at it. ☺️

Dashing back to 1962 in another photo album, I ran across these pictures from my parent's wedding day, honeymoon, and their voyage across the Atlantic to the United States.

Mother's Day was a feature of our May. This Mother's Day we spent in Woodinville at 425 Cellars where Linzy was booked for the affernoon and where the owners were fully generous in sharing with us the different wines they produce.

I stopped by a nearby restaurant to score some bruscetta to accompany our drinks and we had a lovely summer's afternoon enjoying Linzy's performance with the couples and families that had gathered at this time and place, sharing in the same experience. 😊

In the meantime... more photo albums and more photos. This time a photo booth strip with Linzy and my folks in a goofy moment, followed by a moment of a reasonably calm me as a kid sitting with my mom during a family trip to Holland (my first one), and then me, my dad, and my maternal grandmother about to board a boat for a lovely cruise of Amsterdam's canals.

Okay.

So now we come to the part about the moving. Which is the one about how my parents moved from a home with lots of space to a home with less than half that space. And so there were decisions to be made about what to do with anything that would not be making the journey into the new space. The first decision, as it turns out, was the baby grand piano. As in Kimmer always admired that piano from its first appearance in Magnolia and my dad remembered that. So he told her the piano isn't gonna be part of the new space.

Would she like to have it???

The answer, of course, was a full-throated

YES!!!!!!!

And so, with the expert efforts of the team from Pro Piano Move out of Edmonds, my parent's baby grand found its way into our living room where it absolutely looks meant to be. 😊

And yes. Both of us practice on it. I have a few songs I've always been meaning to learn. Kimmer's working on her left hand strength as well as learning specific chords from a book that shows the finger positioning for each one .

And yeah. It's a THICK book. 🙂

Aside from the baby grand, there was a truckload to coordinate and to accomplish. We were there for a solid week clearing out the small stuff then coordinating the medium stuff from the bigger place to the smaller place with the moving company and then, finally, coordinating the big stuff with another moving company both to donations and then to storage. It was one heckuva juggling act with a lot of expert help.

In the end, it all worked out by using every minute and hour available to us, every resource and contact. By the time everything was handled, it was fully dark out, ten at night. Two hours shy of the official deadline.

Gotta love it. 😊

And oh dear God did we sleep hard that very night into the next morning.

You bet we did.

😁

Which brings us to the end of the month...

After a thoroughly exhausting couple May of intense moving and storage activities, we managed to experience the last three Linzy Collins performances of the month, starting with Retreat along the shores of Greenlake.

Of course there's plenty here to love and enjoy. What captured our delight this time around was running across an old high school friend of Linzy's. The last time we saw her was summer of 2025 at the Everett Marina after a Little Lies show on the pier.

Before that?

Oof.

Would've been around the time she and Linzy performed a memorial song that Linzy wrote for a friend/mentor who died in a terrible accident a few weeks before graduation.

Linzy's instinctive reaction was to form her grief into music. Hannah helped her find some of what would inform Linzy's words. And their performance embodied a combination of full-throated grief, deep personality, and comfort in maybe the most authentic and natural way possible.

That song was a release for every single family member, friend, classmate, teacher, anyone who had anything to do with the school and, because of that, bore some part of the geief.

And so that song was a relief that shepherded everyone through and out of that unthinkable moment.

And those terrible feelings.

I won't lie. It is a gift to see these two long passed that and further along in their lives pursuing their futures with such passion.

A coupla nights later we're in Bellevue at our least favorite place to enjoy a Linzy Collins performance. The owner's a lovely lovely gentleman. But his clientele?

They are relentlessly, relentlessly LOUD.

They estsblish the venue as a sports bar as opposed to what it really is: a wine bar.

A wine bar that should reflect the culture and class of its owner but easily manages to do neither.

So yeah. Other than another chance to hang out with Linzy, this evening was a bust. Cacophonous, I think, is the word for our experience.

And then thankfully, thankfully... on the last day of the month, May 31, it's...

Reuben's Brews in Ballard.

Bathed in the light of a setting sun on a summer's day. Adorned with one of the biggest Henry's we've ever seen. Invested with families, couples, and the most kids ever to attend a Linzy Show. In fact, one of the evening's requests came from a little girl whose favorite song of the moment comes from the pop culture hit film, KPOP Demon Hunter, probably one of the biggest animated hits to grace Netflix then graduate to big screens for sing-a-longs. So yeah.

This little girl comes up to Linzy during a song break and makes her request. It really is adorable to watch Linzy interact with such tiny human beings. She granted the request and promised the little girl to do her very best. Which. She. Did. To the absolute delight of the little girl returned to her seat beside her dad.

More than most restaurants, cafes, wine bars, and venues, Reuben's Brews was a very sensory experience. It was people watching. It was feeling sequential moments. It was taste and smell and bathing in the music. 😊

It was the perfect cherry on top, ending the month under a setting summer sun listening to the smooth tones of Linzy Collins in the shadow of an immense Henry painted on a two story wall.

And for all of that? Every single piece of that?

You better believe we're thankful.

After wandering the locks and garden, it was time to walk around Ballard proper.

“CBS Saturday Morning” sits down with author, competitive swimmer and cold plunge expert Chris Ballard while he takes an ice bath to talk about his new book, “The Plunge: Maverick Swimmers, an Unlikely Quest, and the Transformative Power of Cold Water.” Source link

Since it was right next to the Botanical Gardens, next trip in the Ballard area is over to the Locks.