Slide Show

 I’m streaming Pandora through my 54-inch tv connected to my laptop…and my slide show screensaver is flickering past on the big screen.  I'm vacuuming.  I catch a picture or two out of the corner of my eye.  Soon, I'm rooted in front of the screen, alternating between wide smiles, pursed-lipped chagrin, and...mists of tears.  Tears of nostalgia...of longing.  Emotions that I never would have associated with my lonely life in the wilds of the PDX exurbs...

It’s funny how, now that I’m not there anymore, Scappoose has taken on a whole different character. 

While I was there, especially in the last few years, it felt like a heavy weight that I couldn’t scrape off…like a place I couldn’t wait to put behind me.  It felt like I was trudging, one foot in front of the other, straining toward the day I could be free of it.

Now, I look at those pictures…pictures of my home, my yard, my birds, my walks, my drives, the Island, my holiday decorations, almost two decades worth…

And Scappoose has become a happy-sad place.  A place where I had things I loved because I HAD TO.  The loneliness and isolation drove me, to create pockets of beauty and peace and comfortable solitude.  And to go out into the natural world and let it soothe and comfort me.   

I loved those little bits of life in Scappoose.  And that was part of the problem…nobody else did.  They were mine alone.  But they WERE beautiful.  And I will miss them.