east west

and there's nothing you can do about it

Lately, I've been thinking about the following things, which are not at all related:

- Several years ago, I was a camp counselor. I was with a bunch of campers one night and overheard them talking about bathrooms. The prettiest girl in the group said, "I've never pooped. Well, maybe only...like twice or something." I'm not sure why I love that story so much, but it's awesome.

- We picked berries yesterday: 18 pounds of strawberries, 15 pounds of raspberries, and 8 pounds of blueberries. Should be enough to get us through the year. While we were in the fields, a thunderstorm came through. It was exhilarating....like we needed to hurry up and get the harvest done before the rains came. I'm currently eating a big bowl of raspberries and blueberries in milk - just like how grandma taught us.

- Went to tutor my Iraqi family. No one answered the door, so I peeked in their front window. There had been a fire in the kitchen; the stove was gone, the wall was torn out, and the ceiling was just barely hanging on.... I've texted them, called them, sent them messages on facebook - and have no idea where they are. It always ends like this. When I tutored the Somali family, they just disappeared one day. When Dad went to tutor his Cuban student, he found that he had just up and moved to Richmond. I was kind of prepared to show up one day and find them gone - but it doesn't make it any less unsettling.

- We just got back from Colorado. The Rocky Mountain sun is like the arrogant older brother to the Northwest's watery, milquetoast of a sun. I kind of felt like I didn't know what to do with it, how to relate to it. In fact, most of Colorado made me feel that way, in terms of the land. There are so many mountains, so many ranges; it's intimidating, at best. How can I possibly get to know such a place, with so many elevation changes, with tundra and desert and technical climbing and dry wild flowers? I can't imagine that there's room in my mind to even be able to claim another place as my own.

But when I think about it, I was intimidated by the deepest gorges, widest rivers, and greenest greens when I moved to Oregon. Everything was a superlative, and it took me years to come to terms with that. I still don't feel like I have a right to Oregon; it's not mine to adulterize or manipulate. However, I wonder if my little boy will feel the same way about Douglas Firs as I do about Tulip Poplars? He'll easily tell the difference in ferns, like I can tell the difference in southern accents. If we live in Oregon, this is all part of what he'll be given, along with our rhododendron, our berry season, and our harshly divided topography. My lot was cast at birth, and I was given the Appalachians. Others are given the Great Lakes, farms on the plains, the Adirondacks, or the Atlantic shore. I'd assume we all feel that no one else can understand the connection that we have to our given place, location, land. Maybe even when I take my little boy to Virginia and he comes running up from the pond with frogs in his pockets and knees stained red from the clay - even then, he won't understand that land the way that I do. But he'll know Oregon (or Colorado or Montana or wherever we end up) in such an intimate manner that he may have a hard time explaining it to me. And I'll understand that he just can't find the right words. Because here's this dead horse which I've been beating for paragraphs and letters and years, and still am no closer to actually saying what it is that I want to say.

posted by jessica @ 8:40 PM