I never made a plan for my life. I knew that I wanted to be a writer, but I wanted it to happen without work. After college I took a job in retail at Crate & Barrel (as Section Head of Christmas Ornaments, it was assumed to be temporary). On a dare I moved to San Diego and lived the rent-to-rent existence of the immature. Now that I have been in Seattle for 20 years, and in one house for 19 I am starting to look back and wonder, how did I get here? How did I come to put down roots?

At 22 I thought that leaving the childhood home was a great adventure, and California was a cheaper plane ticket than Europe. I didn't realize that I would never go home again or that so soon I would want my own home. It's the age-old story. The impulse decision to relocate at the farthest continental point from home, the post-college need to learn how about the hidden costs in life, then falling in love and deciding to move yet again. At least the move to Seattle was planned.

We chose to load two cars and a cat to move to Seattle (sight unseen for me) because 1) Jim said it was beautiful, 2) I love rain and good libraries and, 3) Seattle is the home of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Jim's lymphoma, Hodgkin's Disease, had been diagnosed just after the first anniversary of our meeting on Friday, April 13, 1984.

Jim had two friends who had moved to Seattle; I had one. He assured me that everyone in Seattle loved to read and that it was a theater town. In truth Jim refused to move to the East Coast for fear of the cold, and we couldn't afford San Francisco. Moving to Seattle, to be close to The Hutch in case his cancer recurred, seemed like buying an insurance policy or leaving the car windows down if you were hoping for rain.

But when the time came that treatment options had been exhausted at the UW Medical Center and Swedish Tumor Institute, the Hutch turned him down for a bone marrow transplant. I always wanted to have a T-shirt made for Jim that said, "I got rejected by the Hutch." He had had too much previous radiation treatment. But there was still an older home needing constant work, a baby born on the day that Jim had a bone marrow biopsy, an old cat struggling to outlive her owner.

The constant for me has always been this house, this block; my bedroom window view on the changing landscape looking south towards downtown Seattle. Jim seemed to confuse this house in Ballard with his disease, as though it was the house and mortgage that clipped his world-traveling wings. The first two years he counted down the months, "22 more months," he'd announce after walking home from the bus stop, "then we're out of here."

Perhaps the hardest thing about Jim's ongoing illness was that it placed us in separate places, both of them lonely. He felt that admitting that he was dying would be the same as giving up. I had to accept that it was likely I would be raising our daughter alone, and had to deal with the guilt I felt over the fact that our lives were not going to end; only his. I needed the daily and weekly routines, garbage, yard waste and Baby Diaper Service on Mondays, story time at the Ballard Library on Wednesdays.

In September of 1993 we traveled as a family to attend my sister's wedding on the East Coast. We never considered that the end was so close that he wouldn't be coming back. But Emily and I returned without Jim; and it has been our home ever since. I moved to his side of the bed as though to fill a gaping hole. I have been able to sink my roots as deep as possible, to look at the house and block as though I will be here forever and draw strength from the soil where so many immigrants made their new lives.

Within months after Jim died I remodeled the awful bedroom (featuring stained textured walls and trim that was Swiss Chalet meets rodeo). Too bad Jim had to spend so many days of his life looking up at the terrible ceiling when he was already in pain. He would have loved how the bigger windows let in the light; he would have loved watching Emily sit in her tree in the backyard and later climb across a dangerously high pole perched between the spruce and the hemlock.

Jim would have been happy growing older in Ballard. Certainly he considered the last two years of his life the happiest - those years after our Ballard baby was born. The countdown on selling the house had long ceased; he and Emily had their many Ballard routines - the paper box on 32nd, the espresso shop, the sunken boat at the Ballard Community Center. Now after 19 years on this block the trees we planted have grown so tall, our daughter has become so mature. But Jim would still recognize the house, the block, and admire the deep roots that he just didn't have a chance to set down.

Peggy's e-mail is atlargeinballard@yahoo.com. She writes additional pieces on her blog At Large in Ballard at www.seattlepi.com