Well, I’ll be damned. Once upon a time I rode a train across the country and arrived at Union Station in Portland to visit my brother and his then girlfriend. I was in the process of moving to Seattle, where I knew people, and where I’d had a few boxes of possessions shipped the day before I left Madison. The afternoon I arrived for a three-day visit was 16 years ago today.
I didn’t really admit that I lived in Portland for the first two or three years I was here. I am not sure why, or how, but somehow I gradually became familiar with the nuances of the seasons here – Oregon was a foreign country to my sensibilities when I arrived, and in many ways it remains so. I got a “temporary” job at a law firm, where I worked for nearly two years. I became something of a militant biker. I started drinking a lot of beer, and became sort of unapologetically slutty. I lived in an apartment for eight years, then I bought a house, which I have now lived in for seven and a half, all of which is strange, considering I used to move, on average, once every eight or nine months.
There are two things about my life in Oregon that remind me that while I may be on a long visit, I do in fact live here. The first is what happens when I’m on a plane coming from wherever I happened to have been and the descent into Portland begins. The experience of looking out the window and seeing the smoky green velvet of Oregon below, usually through a web of clouds, is, to me, grace itself. So far, no matter how far I’ve ventured across the country or around the world, there is no match, emotionally or spiritually, for landing at PDX. I suppose that’s the definition of home.
The second thing is the oranges. I’ve never avidly disliked oranges, but I had never been sufficiently struck by their shrill sweetness to talk about them, or to write about them. Until I came to visit Oregon, I had never been in a place so close to the source of oranges when their time of year rolls around. For the first month or two here, 16 years ago, I stayed in a studio apartment about three minutes from the Fred Meyer on West Burnside, and there I bought oranges, and lots of them. One sure sign that the orange you’re about to eat is going to wake your tongue up properly is when the peal is in very few pieces once you’ve removed it. If an orange peel can be removed and remain in one piece – a hollow, rounded shell of sorts – heaven is not far off. Also, the thicker and more pock-marked the skin, the better. This year, as always, I vowed to eat oranges during February and the first part of March in moderation. And this year, as always, I’m off to a rocky start. I bought a five-pound bag on Saturday afternoon, and here it is Monday morning and I’m already contemplating a special run to the grocery store.
I didn’t really admit that I lived in Portland for the first two or three years I was here. I am not sure why, or how, but somehow I gradually became familiar with the nuances of the seasons here – Oregon was a foreign country to my sensibilities when I arrived, and in many ways it remains so. I got a “temporary” job at a law firm, where I worked for nearly two years. I became something of a militant biker. I started drinking a lot of beer, and became sort of unapologetically slutty. I lived in an apartment for eight years, then I bought a house, which I have now lived in for seven and a half, all of which is strange, considering I used to move, on average, once every eight or nine months.
There are two things about my life in Oregon that remind me that while I may be on a long visit, I do in fact live here. The first is what happens when I’m on a plane coming from wherever I happened to have been and the descent into Portland begins. The experience of looking out the window and seeing the smoky green velvet of Oregon below, usually through a web of clouds, is, to me, grace itself. So far, no matter how far I’ve ventured across the country or around the world, there is no match, emotionally or spiritually, for landing at PDX. I suppose that’s the definition of home.
The second thing is the oranges. I’ve never avidly disliked oranges, but I had never been sufficiently struck by their shrill sweetness to talk about them, or to write about them. Until I came to visit Oregon, I had never been in a place so close to the source of oranges when their time of year rolls around. For the first month or two here, 16 years ago, I stayed in a studio apartment about three minutes from the Fred Meyer on West Burnside, and there I bought oranges, and lots of them. One sure sign that the orange you’re about to eat is going to wake your tongue up properly is when the peal is in very few pieces once you’ve removed it. If an orange peel can be removed and remain in one piece – a hollow, rounded shell of sorts – heaven is not far off. Also, the thicker and more pock-marked the skin, the better. This year, as always, I vowed to eat oranges during February and the first part of March in moderation. And this year, as always, I’m off to a rocky start. I bought a five-pound bag on Saturday afternoon, and here it is Monday morning and I’m already contemplating a special run to the grocery store.
