Memorial Day in Portland

The Memorial Day weekend was a little funky around here, as it often is. For a few months now it’s been wet and chilled and generally unpleasant in Portland. The three-day weekend, though commonly considered the beginning of the summer season, was no exception. There have been very few days thus far that I’ve left the front door open, and I have yet to open any windows. There was not a single week in May that passed without a downpour … of hail. I’m still sleeping under a stack of blankets and taking hot baths.

Memorial Day is strange. Although I don’t need any convincing that where you’re from flavors where you are, this particular three-day weekend and the days leading up to it offer just that. I’m not sure if there’s a scientific (or medical?) name for the way I experience this time of year or not. What it is – in my own terminology – is a complete and utter confusion as to what season we’re actually in, and about to be in.

I remember the first time I experienced this. I was riding my bike away from the apartment building where I used to live. At the T-shaped intersection toward which I was riding stood a grand old house. On top of the house, three or four men in overalls and sweatshirts and big boots crouched on the slope and hammered plywood down to the frame. And as I rode my bike toward the intersection, I thought – or felt, or sensed – that they were working as quickly as possible to get the new roof on the house before the winter started in earnest. Then, half a second later, I was jerked back to the real calendar and I almost laughed at myself, thinking, Jesus Christ, it’s May. And then I almost fell off my bike, because this whatever-it’s-called that I experience yanks me back and forth from late October to late May and then back again in a fraction of a second and it leaves me dizzy.

This year was no different. Outside the gray layer of sky held behind it, faintly, a silvery shimmer that can only mean one thing: Winter won’t be long now. On Saturday I cleaned my house. On Sunday I walked down to Fred Meyer and bought a new radio, which felt like a holiday shopping spree. Then I called my aunt to wish her a happy 85th birthday. She was “getting the table set” for a birthday dinner, an occasion she spoke of in what I thought were holiday terms. On Monday I worked on my current nonsense project and went out for coffee. On the walk back to my house the smell of autumn struck me. I came home, finished Grapes of Wrath and made pork chops for dinner. Then I cut my hair and took a nice hot bath, and when bedtime arrived, I settled in and then, moments later, got up to get a hat, because on cold nights, there’s nothing quite as nice for an all-but-shaved head.