Snohomish

Snohomish is the small farming town north of Seattle where Tully Hart arrives as an outsider and meets Kate Mularkey, her future lifelong friend. Initially, Tully experiences the town as a backwater so alien that she compares it to being on the moon; later, it becomes the landscape of her adolescence and the place she seeks out when the past presses upon her. Its importance lies in that contrast: Snohomish is both the place she wants to leave and the setting to which memory can return her.

Setting and First Impressions

When Tully first comes to Snohomish, the town feels remote despite being less than an hour from downtown Seattle. She has already chosen clothes in the hope of fitting in, but the outfit seems wrong, and the absence of the girl she had hoped to see reinforces her sense that she does not belong. When the school bus arrives, she decides not to go to school. Her blunt refusal captures the emotional distance between her expectations and the rural place she has entered.

The town’s social world is shaped by the dairy farms and paper-mill workers’ homes of the Snohomish Valley. Against its faded green school hallways, Tully seems unusually bright and different. She has no curfew, smokes in the woods behind the school, and becomes an object of whispered fascination. To local students, she is exotic; to Kate, who lives next door, Tully’s sudden popularity makes her own alienation harder to bear. Their daily proximity at the bus stop, separated at first by silence, establishes the town as the setting of a friendship that begins with distance before it becomes intimate.

The Town as the Ground of Friendship

Snohomish soon becomes more than the place where the girls attend school. During the summer after eighth grade, Kate rushes through chores and babysitting so that she can spend her free time with Tully. The two ride their bicycles around the valley and inner-tube down the Pilchuck River. Their friendship is built through these repeated, ordinary excursions across a familiar local landscape, not through a single declaration alone.

The town and its surroundings also hold the memories that give their promises force. Tully and Kate later recall riding their bikes down Summer Hill, and their shared childhood in Snohomish provides a store of particular places, mistakes, and jokes to revisit. When Tully tells Kate the story of their years together, these remembered routes and youthful adventures make the town part of the language of their friendship: a place both can recognize even when time and separation have changed their lives.

Departures and Loss

Snohomish is not a permanent home for Tully. When she learns she must return to her grandmother’s, she tells Kate she has no choice, then opens a suitcase and prepares to leave. The departure turns the girls’ closeness into a long-distance bond, but it does not erase the town’s role in their shared history. Their subsequent letters and the friendship vows they sign as they separate carry the emotional weight of a relationship first formed there.

The town is also linked to grief and changes in Tully’s family life. When she returns, she tells Kate that her grandmother has died. Kate’s response is to hold her while she cries, giving Tully the care she has been waiting for. In this scene, Snohomish is not merely a backdrop for childhood happiness: it is where separation, bereavement, and the need for a chosen source of comfort become part of the friends’ history together.

Return and the Work of Memory

Years later, after a painful conversation with Kate, Tully drives from Seattle toward Snohomish instead of going straight home. The town has changed: it is now a tourist stop with trendy cafés and upscale antique shops. Yet the changes in its streets and businesses matter less to her than what the place summons. Turning onto Firefly Lane feels like being propelled into the past, and she continues to the small white farmhouse where Mrs. Mularkey has made the formerly ragged yard into an English-style garden. In late autumn, flowers glow in the porch light as Tully reaches the door.

This return shows how Snohomish functions differently across Tully’s life. As a girl, she sees it as an alien place from which she wants to escape; as an adult, she seeks it out when she is overwhelmed and needs to approach the history she shares with Kate. The town is altered, but the route to Firefly Lane still connects her to the friendship’s beginnings. In Kate’s later account of their story, the beginning is located in 1974, when the coolest girl in the world moved into the house across the street. Snohomish thus becomes not just the setting of their first meeting, but the remembered ground from which their shared story can be told.