Channeling Ramona

Am here in Portland, where the weather is behaving in true Pacific Northwest fashion, with hosing-down cloudbursts intermingled with the kind of faintly filtered sunshine that warms me through. I just wanted to make a quick update.. there aren't many plot points to my life here, just little darts outward here and there, feeling open and alive and refreshed. My days are taking a shape that looks like: exercise (running or yoga); a good Americano from the Coffee Crutch on Yamhill (run by the sweet bearded boy Ryan); breakfast and some email/forum catchup; reading and making notes; a long late afternoon walk; some cheap dinner somewhere; more reading; lots and lots of sleep.

I could surely live like this. I love this bright little loft perched up on the corner of this 8 story building, view into the tall houses nested in the hillside, the cranes of a narrow condo being erected straight across from the desk, the spire of an old cathedral just to my right. Lots and lots of green. I love the human scale of Portland -- the polar opposite to Houston -- walkable streets, ground and eye level stores and cafes and homes and offices, the best bookstore anywhere (Powell's), a long runnable riverfront, long Czech streetcars efficiently trundling across the city. Slightly shabby buildings much lived in and inhabited, all of the new condos manageably small in magnitude. And the weather -- the rain wakes me up and makes me feel alive, a sensation I always felt in my trips to BC with A, direct tension with her feline crankiness at anything wet.

Had an intense ashtanga class this morning, 5 other women, all pliable and glowing with Pacific Northwest health. I hadn't done a class for a couple of months, and I'll feel it tomorrow -- but I felt *open*.

It's funny, this back-of-brain sense of pilgrimage to the world of Beverly Cleary, her books so simultaneously wholesome and uncloying. I always hankered after Klickitat street, and it tickles me that scenes from her books keep flashing across as I walk the downtown streets. The Oregonians exibit at the Museum around the corner evokes the Mitch and Amy gold-panning episode, the rain the pink raincoat with the black velvet collar that Shelley disdained, hankering after a beat up yellow slicker. And everywhere, Ramona trying to lose her shadow.

Sometimes recursively ducking back into the characters of my childhood give me the sense of all new possibilities. It's a good place to create from.