street spirit (fade out)
I'm listening to a fourteen-year-old radiohead album that takes me back to the mid-nineties and I feel the same way I did then (oh the angst) while I develop a spreadsheet with definitions of office furniture terminology for future employees. What is this juxtaposition.
Every Morning You Greet Me
Arrived home from work last night - exhausted from the day, dreading the evening's to do list: Wash Montana, Clean the Basement, Mow the Lawn, Unpack from My Trip to Virginia, Find the Thing That Has Died and is now Decomposing in Some Far-Reaching Corner Behind the Cabinets in the Kitchen. Threw my satchel and the mail on the living room coffee table, and then went to the bedroom to change clothes before attempting to give Montana a bath. I looked outside our window into the backyard - no Montana. I know I left him there this morning….didn't I? The fence was still latched, his water dish still full, no freshly dug holes - almost as if he was never there in the first place. But he certainly wasn't in the house. I checked the neighbor's yard - no Montana. Ran down to the park - lots of pugs and yellow labradors - but no chocolate labrador. Ran to our several other neighbor's houses, growing more frantic at each visit. Have you seen Montana? Peter was out of town - it was completely my responsibility to find him. Where do you even begin. Our neighbor Eric and his two year old boy, Kaj-Riis, came to help - we split up the neighborhood and went from there. Bicycles, an empty blue leash, calling his name ad nauseum. Came home defeated, sat on the curb, and cried. Peter called from Florida, frantic: "have you called the animal shelter, have you checked the park, did he get under the kayak, is he behind the wood pile"….while he was talking I heard a familiar whine. Turned around and saw his brown nose nudging its way through the neighbor's fence (the same yard I had checked two times previously). I don't know how he got there, and it doesn't matter. We went inside, and I swore never again to inwardly curse the fact that he makes the house such a wreck and sheds all over the floor and generally smells like dirt.
I turned on the cd player and listened to Laura's cd that she made for her baby boy, due in July. Listened to Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer sing Edelweiss - now maybe because I was emotional after the evening I'd had, but the song left me mourning my homeland of Austria (I'm not Austrian?), feeling the lack of leaving a place that is so much a part of you that you simply cannot separate yourself from it. And this was odd, because just that morning I went to the bakery and heard Smetana's "Ma Vlast" (My Fatherland) playing - it was written for the old Czech Republic. I heard it in my Music Literature class, and came home raving about it - Dad then told me that my grandmother had always loved that song, even though we don’t have an ounce of Czech blood in us. I hadn't heard this song for about five years, but hearing it yesterday morning just brought all this emotion out - and I was left leaning against the window sill, yearning for late 1800's Czech Republic, for the flow of the Vltava River. This doesn't make any sense.
But then again, maybe it does. I spent the weekend in Virginia - my homeland, I guess. The poplar trees were a full leafy green, crickets were out in full force, and the frogs by the pond have started this season's nightsong. Within two hours after my flight landed, Dad and I found ourselves on a back country road in Floyd County - making our way up Bent Mountain, and then meandering towards Poor Mountain. Using the roads no one takes, the hairpin curves so steep you think you'll never make it up alive….we made it to the top of Poor Mountain and spring hadn't yet hit up there - the rhododendron didn't have their buds, the trees had the tentative green sprouts of late winter. You never really get to see any evidence of altitude in the southern appalachians - there's no alpine line to account for, no snow covered rock face to admire.
I spent my time wandering the property (avoiding the spider webs, I came upon a stranger in the woods - and in the way of the region, we didn't talk to each other but I left frightened and wondering why he was on our land), exploring an increasingly-shuttered downtown with a friend from high school post-midnight, driving I-81 north to meet Laura for dinner. I drove with those long haulers out of the Tennessee Bible Belt ("Jesus is our driving force") - maybe we were all listening to Johnny Cash - and thought about how different Oregon is than that place which I've always known.
parentheses
So on Wednesday, the predictable Oregon sky finally let loose (I guess she'd been holding it in for quite a while). We had hail (covered the ground, left holes our hosta, knocked all the rhododendron flowers to the ground), rain (blinding: southern Ohio-style), lightning (our count was at four seconds - less than a mile away), and thunder (all of my coworkers clapped when we heard it - this made me appreciate them very much).
