We woke up to a magical blanket of white.It was a snow day in North Portland.Mind you, Portland is not like your typical, say, Midwestern or Northeastern city. We react to a stray falling crystal of frozen water like a Baptist deacon's wife receiving a pink plastic dildo in the mail; great outbursts of fearful hysterics and shrieking. So when the day dawned on a one-inch carpet of snow the Portland Public Schools were already closed.It was my turn to stay home with the kiddos, so Mojo went slipping away off to work and I led (or was led by) the progeny out into the wintery landscape.Portland snow is usually a bottomish sort of snow on the Snow Quality Scale; thick and wet, half water before it even lands, it makes decent snowball-and-snowman snow but is somewhere between moderately adequate and semi-crap for skiing and sledding. No matter; the little ones slid about on it was much as they could, the North Portland plateau having no more defilade than would provide a small rodent with cover.The snow fun lasted for an hour or so, and was fortified by the addition of the neighbor kids, until the cold and wet were sufficient to drive us back indoors. So there had to be cocoa, and Tinkerbell, and video games (coffee and gossip for the grownups).And by noon the snow was gone.
It must be the depths of winter when the mere absence of clouds and mizzle makes me as giddy as an opium fiend and as excited as a debutante. I'd blog some more, but the sunny day beckons like a scantily-clad houri.
It's not raining at the moment, in the early morning hours, but the porch lights and streetlights are shining off the wet bitumen of Amherst Street. The ground, where I can see it, is dark with the cold rain of the previous day and the remaining leaves are stained and sodden. It is the dark time, the wet winter of the year in the Pacific Northwest.I've lived here in North Portland for ten years now, in Oregon for twenty, the longest I have lived any single place in my life. Admittedly, I was a vagabond from my infancy when my father moved about the country at the behest of his company, a oxford-shirted, narrow-tied salesman and manager for a chemical company, the embodiment of the Sixties corporate man. But this place is the one I chose, or, at least, my then-wife chose for us and I have continued on in. So I have no justification to complain about the winter rain.
And normally I don't. It rains here, it always has. Lewis and Clark noted that the natives of the Oregon Coast wore no clothing below the waist because it would have been constantly saturated in the winter, while they and their troops groused endlessly about the constant rain. But vinyl, rubber, fleece, and gore-tex are more weatherproof than leather, and we here are better protected than the soggy inhabitants of Fort Clatsop. For all that I work out-of-doors all through the winter I have no complaint for most of the rest of the year.
But the rainy dark of midwinter always seems different.In the short daylight between the turning of the sun-season in late December and the return of the first of spring in early March the rain seems grimmer, the sodden trees more dour, than they do in December or April; the former retains the lingering warmth of autumn, the latter holds the promise of spring. But January and February are all winter; dirty, wet, cold, a plodding round of long, raw nights and short, dank days. Chests congest, noses drip, fevers flare. Tempers shorten, tongues sharpen. I have no idea of the actual statistics, but I'll bet that all the domestic crimes spike in the dark months. Suicide, murder, battery...they all seem less unthinkable when the cold rain spits in your face and the sky lours about your head like a bad mood.
So I leave my bed and the warm, embracing scent of my sleeping beloved and sit by the light of the screen, to gaze out at the slick black street thinking of the darkness and the coming rain.
The last several days have been hot, mid to upper 90's, which...is where my daughter jumped in my lap and caused me to post this prematurely. Sorry. Here's the rest of what I meant to post;
Anyway, it's damn hot. And to add to the entertainment, my usual commute home blew up Wednesday, trapping me and about 7-800 other commuters on northbound McLoughlin Blvd. as an old (as in 60-year-old) 12-inch water main deconstructed, flushing out the subgrade from under 1/8-mile of street.After a half-hour wait in the 90-degree heat I managed to turn around, find a local place to eat (and several hefeweitzens...), and after an hour...it was STILL a parking lot. Wednesday evening I left the office door at 5:05 and stepped through my own at 7:15. Yikes.
The kiddos have been sweethearts - having their Auntie Kathie here to give them a daycare break has helped. But we're going to need to pool time if this heat keeps up. Air conditioning and nonstop kidvid is NOT a good substitute for getting outdoors.
Oh. I should probably mention that it turns out that I have developed an intestinal ailment.
There are people whose nature it is to suffer from interesting and picturesque ailments. "Consumption". Now there was a disease. You wasted away delicately, fastidiously, Greta Garbo dying scenically in "Camille".
Or leukemia. You could get somewhere with leukemia - hell, Campbell Scott dawdling grave-ward with leukemia managed to nail Julia Roberts in that perennial topic of Oscar-neglect, "Dying Young". Those are diseases a guy can make work.
But this one? Nope. This one will forever be associated with SNL's Joe Piscopo and Robin Duke moaning that they have diiiiverticuliiiitisssss... Yes. I have diverticulitis.
The is just no fucking romance in that.
Aside from the lack of theatrically pale wasting away, I've been taking antibiotics for two weeks, which, if your internal workings weren't screwed up before is guarenteed to screw them up fairly thoroughly. And I have been living with the sensation of having a roughly hamster-sized object wedged in my lower gut, which is about as much fun as it sounds.
It was a snow day in North Portland.
Mind you, Portland is not like your typical, say, Midwestern or Northeastern city. We react to a stray falling crystal of frozen water like a Baptist deacon's wife receiving a pink plastic dildo in the mail; great outbursts of fearful hysterics and shrieking. So when the day dawned on a one-inch carpet of snow the Portland Public Schools were already closed.
It was my turn to stay home with the kiddos, so Mojo went slipping away off to work and I led (or was led by) the progeny out into the wintery landscape.
Portland snow is usually a bottomish sort of snow on the Snow Quality Scale; thick and wet, half water before it even lands, it makes decent snowball-and-snowman snow but is somewhere between moderately adequate and semi-crap for skiing and sledding. No matter; the little ones slid about on it was much as they could, the North Portland plateau having no more defilade than would provide a small rodent with cover.
The snow fun lasted for an hour or so, and was fortified by the addition of the neighbor kids, until the cold and wet were sufficient to drive us back indoors. So there had to be cocoa, and Tinkerbell, and video games (coffee and gossip for the grownups).
And by noon the snow was gone.
