strike that

weekly reader

Sunday I swam in the Susquehanna. It started out as just a canoe but the river was so wide and smooth and it’s such a beautiful name, Susquehanna, that I wanted it all around me. And the sun went down and nine of us wandered around Talley’s farm, mostly staring up at the Milky Way but sometimes looking down to shadow box in the light from the barn.

Monday Ty and I crunched down the gravel road at five in the still-dark morning, south to Philadelphia. (Philadelphia. If I prayed it would be with place names.) We had a diner breakfast, eggs and butter-heavy toast and corned beef hash, and he left me at the bottom of the escalator in the Philadelphia Airport. I flew to Seattle via Houston because that is airline geography. On the second flight I gave up my window seat to a separated couple, and ended up between a serious whiskey drinker and a very nice guy from North Carolina named Ryan, who likes Seattle even though it is "very fast paced." Heh.

Tuesday I woke up in Beth and Sarah’s living room loft bed. Beth made French toast and I loaded the truck with a rocking chair and a fifties Formica table. I met up with Patricia and Gabriel, indie filmmakers who are finishing up a documentary on a design studio I was in three years ago. For four hours they filmed me walking by buildings and looking pensively at the Duwamish, and then I was back on the road. I drove over the river into Portland as the sun was setting, and the water was orange and the skyline was twinkley, and it felt like coming home.

Wednesday I was back on I-5, down to Eugene to empty my storage unit. Melissa hid a key under a pumpkin so I could claim three months of unforwarded mail. While loading the truck to airtight perfection I had conversations with the storage place desk guy (also from North Carolina), the storage place equipment operator (who ropes cattle), and two middle-aged men putting things in storage (one threw his back out ten years ago, the other spent several months living in New Orleans in 1984). Apparently a girl loading a truck with boxes is quite a curiosity. I found my way home with no map this time and no wrong turns. I celebrated with Jamey at the Aladdin, watching Andrew Bird from the balcony’s front row with end-of-summer hefeweizens.

Thursday I unpacked. Part of me kept saying What do you need all this stuff for? You just spent three perfectly fine months without it. But then there were the ceramic cups I made last winter, and the fuzzy white sweater I love when it snows, and my big folio of small-denomination stamps. And at night I ate a salad with lettuce and tomato from the garden and cheese and chick peas from the co-op, and I drank cold white wine from Cave Junction Oregon on the porch with my housemate Brad.

And this morning I woke up wrapped in blankets instead of a sleeping bag, in my bed under two sunny wide-open square windows. And the mailman brought one handwritten letter and one New Yorker, addressed to me here in Portland.

posted by tortaluga @ 11:20 AM