Falling Water

Five pm and it's dark, blowing, rainy and cold.

Sorry to state the obvious, but I just needed more time to bid summer good-bye, and I'm not going to get it. There's some leaves stuck to the street, anything yellow glows supernaturally, and everyone is wearing their shoulders in the "up" position, total defense. I begin hearing the sawing of the strings in Vivaldi's Four Seasons, audio shadows, abandoned porches.

The grass looks great, as do the remaining dahlias, chrysanthemums, and the tawny gold hydrangeas. How about some snapping fresh-crop apples and a few caramels? That's much better.

The last two days I have spent in the belly of the bureaucratic beast, three hours one day and almost three the next, remembering a time when people grew or traded for most of their food and material needs, and wondering how to get closer to that myself. By the second day I was almost in a trance from the noise and frustrated hostility of the workers and their customers, and watching so many toddlers running around with circles under their eyes and gray skin. There were five people I saw reading the Jon Krakauer book "Into the Wild" which is a new Sean Penn film also, and the irony of it made me smile. Surreal bureaucracy and eccentric survivalist meet in the Oregon Job Search offices. Unexpectedly my caretaker instinct rose up, and I wanted to sit all those little kids down to a good hot nutritious home-cooked from scratch meal. No nuggets of any kind. There's my Mid-west again...

The change in weather has brought an abrupt end to the "outside on the porch" season, and for the distraction I find such weather to be, and it's all scrub-a-dub-dub indoors. Sewing, posting items on my online site, writing, going to the booth with more stuff, putting on a pot of rice and beans, start some soup. 'Portland Rain' is a scent you can find at 'Escentuals' on Hawthorne and also on NW 23rd, and it has that subtle fresh smell with a hint of spice and wet leaves, not too heavy, and perfect for this early Autumn time of year. What they don't (and can't) manage to capture in the scent's complexity is the occasional wave of thai wok from down the street and the chimeria in my neighbor's back yard, and the wet mulch from the garden. Or whatever else you smell in your part of Portland---pizza, headshop and fried chicken? Bio-diesel, burnt toast and coffee roasting? I'm not going to go into what the waiting room at Job Search smelled like.