Oh, Portland. I love you, but you are not the Portland of our childhoods, the Portland of our 20s, or even the Portland of eight years ago, when we moved to Salem. It's been a bit of a bittersweet realization in the last two years since we've been back that as much as we like the new and interesting things that have come to (especially our side of) town, with them has come congestion and density and expense. My husband works on the other side of town and it has taken him as long as two hours to get home in the evening, the average being somewhere between an hour to an hour and a half. When we go to Mt. Hood or to the Gorge to hike, we can't find parking half the time and the trails are flooded with people. We end up going down south to our old beach because getting to/through Cannon Beach/Ecola is an endless line of traffic. As a result, our outdoor excursions have greatly diminished since being back here. There's no heading out the door when Papa gets home to go somewhere for a quick dip or paddle, like we did often at Silverton Reservoir, or to Minto-Brown for a quiet evening picnic. We are really missing the advantages of being somewhere a little more rural. The ease of it. The slow of it.
A couple of weekends ago we drove down to Salem and spent several hours at Minto-Brown Island Park. We walked the path we have walked so many times before, right to our favorite fishing, nature-collecting, reading, bike-riding, picture-taking, cloud-gazing, bird-watching spot, spread out a blanket, and reveled in the quiet familiarity, in the slow, in the now. Bliss.
