Color

Portland is about as far as you can get from Minnesota, in colors and temperatures. This morning, I left a city of bright pale-yellow sun, bright pale-blue sky, white snow and pale grey ice. Everything here, though, is green and brown, and the skies are leaden grey. The colors are saturated and heavy. I suppose I could have stepped off the plane in a desert (burning blues and yellows and tans) or the tropics (sparkling greens and blues) for a similar sense of different.

My flight was uneventful, aside from turbulence due to frigid temperatures at take-off and turbulence due to high winds at landing. We had a few of those moments, as we entered the clouds, when the hum of the jets abruptly lessens -- which, when it happens to my Mini, I attribute to losing power (known as the "bog in first gear"), and thus in flight I imagine we are bogging, coasting, held in place by inertia, like Wile E. Coyote run off a cliff but doesn't know it yet.  Such moments are full of a resurgence of belief in a just, loving, eye-on-the-sparrow God, who might need to be reminded that there are a few hundred people in this airplane who would prefer not to die, today. (Sadly, once the engines return to full power, I sink back to normal boring agnosticism.)

I arrived back in Oregon mid-day. The Texan was of course at work, on the other side of town, so as arranged, I took the light rail to the nearest-to-home station and then dragged my (wheeled) suitcase through a mile of neighborhood sidewalks to home. Fortunately, it was not raining, or even drizzly, and compared to Minnesota, practically shirt-sleeve temperatures.

I have a clear memory of intending to bring my house keys to Minnesota with me. I have no clear memory of actually packing them. In any event, they were nowhere to be found when I arrived at the house, and searching for a hidden spare set in the shed or studio proved fruitless. However, I adopted the attitude of a house-breaker, and realized that the windows over the kitchen sink could be jimmied open from the outside. It was actually a lot of fun, having to stand on top of the garbage can and then pull myself up to a height of maybe 9 or 10 feet and then over the sill into the kitchen sink (narrowly missing the knives and glasses on the drying rack).  The recycling bin got tipped over in the process, making such a racket that I'm not worried about a burglar being able to do this quietly. (But we locked the kitchen windows tonight, just in case.)