Born with duck feet...

No, I wasn't born with a duck's webbed feet, but I sure do love spring.  And what is better than spring but spring in Portland, Oregon where ducks waddle into fountains and the smell of damp bark lingers on your clothes.  I am fresh off the plane from my spring break trip.  I really love Oregon.  And I am really glad that my mom moved back there so I can go and visit and be in the greenery.  Sometimes, a girl needs to hydrate.

Fangorn Forest aka The Reed College Campus

Oregon is lush, and the flowers are in profusion, but more are coming.  We've had such a mild spring here in Colorado, but I worry that that mildness (sans snow and rain) will make a tough summer.  Listen, I am a Colorado girl at heart, I was born knowing all the words to "Rocky Mountain High" and I have a great sense of direction.  But there is a draw, a pull towards the rainy northwest, especially the Pacific ocean.

The coast was especially beguiling this week.  It would be coolish and stormy, and then the blue sky would creep through and reveal a postcard just for me.   Mom and I went to Newport and holed up next to a fire and read books and drank tea and ate fantastic sea salted cookies from Panini's and settled into our beach routine.  Get up, breakfast, read, walk, lunch, read, grade (maybe... don't overdo it), look at the fire, go out to the lighthouse, eat at Local Ocean.  It is a good routine, and sometimes we get to see the people we've come to know in Newport and sometimes our family comes to meet us.  Fish, chips, and crabcakes are always involved in our days there.

I didn't find the Graham Greene book I was looking for at the used book shop, but I did find something else this break, my sanity.  You know how sometimes people picture their "little stone cottage" when faced with anxiety and stress?  Oregon is that for me, and I work on refueling the imagery when I venture back into it.

Reed College--yes, it is gorgeous

Blue sky!  Go catch it!

Ruby at the pub with a friend... and tater tots.

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.

      "Spring" by Edna St. Vincent Millay

I love that poem by Edna St Vincent Millay, Spring.  It is sorta bleak to be honest, but poets have always been a little cynical about springtime.  Yeah it sure is purdy, but it comes with mud and muck.  But every cycle has some detritus, right?  We leave a season, enter another and the moving boxes take a while to break down.  But this April, my refreshment has arrived, and I will be the babbling idiot running down the hill, strewing flowers.  Deal with it, Edna.