spring, overjoy
Portland is so beautiful. Right now it's just impossible to ignore, spring is spectacular. The trees are flowering and starting to poke out gold-green leaves. The mountains are out, they keep surprising me because they're so pastel-close to the colors of the sky. Biking home from Shabbat Seder last night the air was soft and magnolia-cherry-fragrant and the stars were dazzlingly bright. The beauty of it nearly brought me to tears. I love it here.
I've been exploring neighborhoods. There are so many good ones. I continue to be surprised boy how not-Baltimore it is. I keep expecting the hard edges and sudden dropoffs, but the charming spots of urban renewal here border on... less renewed residential neighborhoods. Streets with terrible paving and only a couple freshly painted houses. The new development, the obviously recently-revitalized centers, those give me pangs for my up and coming Baltimore, for Charles Village and Station North. Five or ten years, I suspect the corner of 26th and Howard will look a lot like 30th and Alberta. I was excited to watch it do this. But I can live with arriving later in the process.
There are times it's hard to accept I get to keep it. Portland has been such a passing-through place in my life. Holidays and visits and on-the-way-tos. I keep whispering 'I live here' even after three months. The last two visits were the times I really looked at the city with an eye to living in it, and I have wistful flashbacks to the other parts of that imagined life, but it's getting easier to anchor my hopes in the present. There's a lot I want. Life is coming together, but slowly. I am happy that I'm putting it together here, though. Hard to complain when I'm in a place so lovely and interesting I am often worried I will bike into traffic because it keeps turning my head.
I've been exploring neighborhoods. There are so many good ones. I continue to be surprised boy how not-Baltimore it is. I keep expecting the hard edges and sudden dropoffs, but the charming spots of urban renewal here border on... less renewed residential neighborhoods. Streets with terrible paving and only a couple freshly painted houses. The new development, the obviously recently-revitalized centers, those give me pangs for my up and coming Baltimore, for Charles Village and Station North. Five or ten years, I suspect the corner of 26th and Howard will look a lot like 30th and Alberta. I was excited to watch it do this. But I can live with arriving later in the process.
There are times it's hard to accept I get to keep it. Portland has been such a passing-through place in my life. Holidays and visits and on-the-way-tos. I keep whispering 'I live here' even after three months. The last two visits were the times I really looked at the city with an eye to living in it, and I have wistful flashbacks to the other parts of that imagined life, but it's getting easier to anchor my hopes in the present. There's a lot I want. Life is coming together, but slowly. I am happy that I'm putting it together here, though. Hard to complain when I'm in a place so lovely and interesting I am often worried I will bike into traffic because it keeps turning my head.