I brought my journal, but soon realized that we were so often on the road that I would need to use my palm-sized notebook to capture moments from our visit to Colorado, Oregon, and Washington.
Life, after all, occurs as a series of impressions. Sentences wrote themselves in my head as I ambled through foreign landscapes. Later, I would scribble it out, then sit with the butt of my pen against my chin, thinking, before crossing out the wrong words and adding the right ones.
Here are some of my more lucid vignettes:
“We tried to tell her,” Mahlon shrugged, “but she took her little dog walking out there anyway,” pointing to the grasslands adjacent to his condo where coyotes had killed and eaten his neighbor’s pet.
When Evie opens the back door, Cortado dashes outside, up and over the tall plank fence, and Em follows, laughing when he flops in the dirt for a belly rub.
Bob and I lay on our king-sized hotel bed, opening bags of snack-sized chips and M&Ms while watching Cinderella on the Disney Channel.
A young boy crouched like a border collie, eyes on a chubby prairie dog, and with a wiggle of his hips, dashed forward.
Jade stood high in the cottonwood, showering me with encouragement as I begged my right leg to hoist me above my handhold.
Five-year-old Evie and I regarded their cats, Cortado and Rufus. “Who is more likely to make a break for it,” I asked. “Cortado,” she said without hesitation.
“Walk with a limp,” Ned suggested as we entered Tuk Tuk Thai for takeout after parking in the handicapped spot.
I spread out on the soft carpet to stretch, comforted by the murmur of Bob and his college roommate, Ned, sharing coffee on the patio deck.
A whisper of starlings swirls and pivots above us as we cruise towards Cottage Grove in our rented GMC Terrain.
Swapping stories over lunch with Molly and Shane and our newly adopted daughters, Alex and Jade, Camille exposed her inner badass.
The grey-bearded man leaped to his feet when he saw the folded bill between Amy’s fingers, tripped over the sign reading, “Vet, needs gas,” and inadvertently dropped his pants.
One hundred and sixty-four steps later, pulsing with endorphins, embarrassed by the hubris of white people and saddened by the ensuing demise of the native Clatsops, I pushed open the wooden door to find a terror-stricken woman standing in the high breeze atop the Astoria Column. “I’m afraid of heights,” she said. “Why did you come up here?” “For the challenge.”
The child in the bathroom stall dropped a seashell into the toilet and asked what she should do. “Leave it. It’s a goner,” her mother said from the queue with a, “Kids!” shrug for our benefit.
I stood frozen in the primeval air, dwarfed by ferns, until I was certain the muffled snaps were falling pinecones and not a bear.
A delicate pine seedling reaches for sunlight, safely rooted in a moldering nurse log too wide to step over.
Folding the dead man’s shirts inside what was once his majestic home with its rooms of wood and leather furniture, I resolved to reach my finish line with a pauper’s stash. It will be enough to die forgiven and heard.
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One reply on “Litany of Unexpected Gifts – highlights from 13 days away from home Aug 22-Sep 3”
I love these! This is how people end up being famous long after they’re gone, right!?