i truly heart pdx

so here i am feeling a little sentimental tonight about my beloved city. i was just thinking about my wonderful friends here in portland and started reflecting on my move here and how much has changed since then, almost 11 years ago.

as you all know i grew up in new mexico but had spent some time in oregon when my parents decided to move us here (southern oregon that is) after my fourth grade year. i think we were here two years before we moved back down south. at the time it was very traumatic moving here, finally getting adjusted and then turning around and moving back down (which at the time i was happy about) but because of my time here and the people i met and experiences i had while we were here, i always romanticized about the northwest and eventually decided to move back up. however, there have been many times over the years that the idea of moving back down has crossed my mind. fortunately, my job allows me to travel a great deal and i have to tell you, i am always so happy to fly over mount hood and begin the descent in to portland and i never felt that way about albuquerque. even when i returned from a trip to paris i was happy to see my beautiful portland and to come home. and that is saying a lot because i really love paris!

when i got on-line to look for a photo of portland to post i said i would not post the picture that we see all of the time with the downtown skyline and mount hood in the background because i wanted something a little more real and perhaps even rainy but then i found this great photo of the hawthorne bridge and thought it was perfect. with the exception of one year, i have always lived in hawthorne and i remember crossing this bridge to downtown everyday to go to work and feeling nervous about stopping in the rain on those steel grates and thinking just how crazy it was to have these slick grates in the rain and what the heck were they thinking when they built this bridge?? crossing the bridges is old news now and i do it several times a day and i love coming in to downtown in the mornings and i love even more heading home to southeast in the evenings. we really do live in a wonderful city and i love it more every day. and no, it's not perfect, it has its flaws just like we do but it hangs in there and so do i.

so, i look back on that rainy night in january after i had lived here just one month and the rain poured and poured and poured and i say thank you portland for giving me such crappy weather immediately after i moved here because if i could make it through that winter, i could make it through anything (except last year's great snow of '08 but that's another post entirely).

(photo by planetware)