In which the Williamsons spend lots of time driving through @#$%*&^#*@ Tigard

This has been a week-end almost completely devoted to Portland in one way or another. Philip, Max, and I went to the Kennedy School in the North East side of town to visit an old kind-of-lost friend of Philip's named Elizabeth with whom he had many adventures in college in Santa Cruz. Elizabeth and her partner moved to Portland before we did and she and Philip have been reconnecting over the last few months.

I never got to know Elizabeth, so it was a little like meeting someone for the first time. I'm not a very shy person but it's easier for me to strike up casual conversations with completely random people on the street than it is for me to get to know a person who I have some incentive to have in my life. I get over these moments pretty fast for a crazy person. Plus, Elizabeth was so warm and spazzy that I was able to relax a little. (Spazziness, for those who don't know, is one of the best qualities to have. You could call it "enthusiasm for life" if you want to be stodgy. But why would you want to be stodgy?)

Max wasn't particularly at his best. We passed the witching hour somewhere between Sherwood and Tigard. We left for Portland right after the store closed, so Max was already tired and grumpy and the Kennedy School, though completely familiar territory to him, isn't exactly filled with fun rides and toys. Something he never lets us forget. He doesn't really care if he's sitting at the same table with God, he is not impressed with adults drinking beer and catching up with each other.

Still, he was slightly mollified by the soda. Which didn't make him hyper at all.

The table we got was extraordinarily small. We had to have a whole separate table to put our pizza on. The problem was that for some reason the Kennedy School is just hopping on Saturday nights and there was an hour and a half long wait for a table in the pub. So we found this little guy in the theater/lounge/pizza parlor. Which was, by the way, absolutely packed with about a hundred and fifty people in line for tickets to the movie about to play.

Even though I'm not particularly afraid of crowds or claustrophobic, I actually dislike hoppin' joints. It has always been my preference (except when I was seventeen and clueless) to go to quiet places. The kind of places where the waitresses are a little careworn, the tables have been carved in, and the mood is EMPTY.

This is probably because I have a little anxiety about places that are too popular, you know, too HOT. I find the noise of a thousand people makes me feel edgy. It actually makes me feel a little like a recluse. Like maybe I'm a Salinger in the making. Like I'm getting a little preview into my agoraphobic future. Poor Max.

Then on Sunday Philip went to PDX airport to pick up my mom in the quest to steal her away from California and Kaiser-the-Evil.

This morning we headed back to Portland to check out prospective neighborhoods for my mom to live in once she's recovered from her hip surgery. We went to the Hawthorne district which we really enjoyed. A very comfortable kind of funky area with lots of retro furniture and vintage clothes shops, but not too many people crawling around like they are just way too cool for their own skin. It's the kind of area I would enjoy living in. (Though I've already given my heart to the North East.)

We had just enough time to drive around the 23rd street neighborhood near the Pearl district. This is another area my mom would love to live in. Very urban, polished, bustling, and full of beautiful brick apartment buildings. A bit posh, but pretty enough that if I wanted to go urban I would seriously be attracted to that area myself.

The prettiest view in our yard.

The posting difficulty has been addressed and it turned out that I had clicked on the "edit HTML" tab by accident. Whew. I get panicky when things go wrong and I can't figure out what or why. It's a little like being trapped in amber. Or maybe I should say it's a little like I imagine being trapped in amber would feel like. Or at least, the idea of being trapped in amber makes me panic just as much as things going mysteriously wrong does.

Now I feel certain that anyone out there who may be attending this ridiculous dialog with myself is wishing I had not fixed the posting difficulty.

It's funny how I thought for so many years that I was such a tough urban cookie. I liked the bustle and the atmosphere in San Francisco. Until I burnt out. Until our apartment building and everything within a two block radius of us was surrounded by a silent barrier of police trying to stop a carjacker from killing anyone while he played around with a couple hundred rounds of ammunition. Until I couldn't get all the people, the sounds of people, the smells of people out of my head.

I still thought I was a tough urban chick. Even when we moved to San Anselmo. Even after we moved to Petaluma. Although, while we lived in Petaluma I began to see glimmers of the person underneath everything. I started wrestling with my mom's ivy hedge (we rented an apartment in the lower half of her house) and felt oddly invigorated. Especially if it was cold and foggy out and I could blast some traditional Scottish music while I did it and fancy myself a rugged Scottish woman. (You see how richly stocked my imagination is?)

It wasn't until we had our first house that I discovered, or uncovered, what had really been there all the time. Even in the city. The spirit of a homesteader. I still love visiting great cities, but I'm glad to come home to my small town and big yard. I am dreaming of an expanding empire of edible green rather than an ever shrinking patch of lawn.

I hope I get to keep what I have because I really love it.

Note: I meant to say to Violett Crumble in regards to the last post that I do really appreciate having the amount of space I do. I also hope you get more space in the near future too because I know how hard it can be to be creative in such small spaces. Especially when you share that space with a wee one! I just couldn't resist making a satire of my mess.