Goodbye red house, hello Bay

We moved this weekend. We packed up our little red house in southeast Portland and hauled our belongings across the snowy pass of Highway 6 and carried them into a little white house in Bay City.

Monday was my last night sleeping in that little back bedroom. We slept on the old foam pads, which brought me back to my first nights in that house- driving out from Astoria with Chieffy. He’d sleep in the back of the car in a parking garage downtown while I went to class, and then we’d drive out to the empty red house, spend the night on the foam pads and get up at 5 to be back in Seaside in time for work. I didn’t even see that house in the daylight for two weeks or so.

This morning as I ventured out into my last morning of rush hour traffic, there was McDonald’s trash scattered across our lawn. People like to throw trash out their car windows as they drive by. We pick it up every day and put it in the garbage can. It is a busy corner on the bus line, where I witnessed two car accidents and a girl hit by a car. Also victims of that busy corner were one cat and one dog. No one ever came for the dog, so it’s now buried in our backyard under the blossoming plum tree.

We had invasions of mice, ants and these little flying things that got into my flour, oatmeal and rice. The mice were the worst though. Our neighbors across the street were obviously dealing something crack-like, as there were always different cars pulling up and idling there at the curb for a considerable length of time while one person went into the house to do God-knows-what.

I shouldn’t dwell too much on the bad though.

Kid learned to ride a bike in the park up the street. The Springwater Corridor trail was just a few blocks away and I explored its entirety on my bike. Our backyard had a bird bath and a small, perfect Japanese maple. We slept in a tent out there when the summer heat made sleeping indoors unbearable. Sometimes I’d come home from work on a scorching summer evening, drenched in sweat from a 13-mile bike commute in rush hour traffic, and dive into a cool kiddie pool, clothes on and all. We survived being housebound after one crazy winter snow storm by renting cross country skis and exploring our white-blanketed neighborhood from a whole new perspective.

I grew sunflowers and tall stalks of corn in the tiny strip of soil against the west facing side of the house. Ebon built a little table and we carried our dinner out to the backyard on countless summer evenings. Kid grew two years older, finished kindergarten and first grade. I worked full time and went to grad school in the evenings. Ebon played in a band that practiced in our cool basement. I learned to bake bread and knitted a gigantic blanket. We celebrated our first and second wedding anniversaries. We explored the Columbia River Gorge, sought refuge from the city by hiking up into its cool rock canyons and made it a mission to find its lesser-known waterfalls.

A life well-lived in a little red house in southeast Portland, and now we keep moving forward.

Advertisement