I burned my boy's toast. I dropped the cat's food upside down on the kitchen floor. I'm still loopy from my virus, so bear with me. Yesterday was a wash since I slept like a cat, but today I feel just well enough to do things badly.
It's raining again. My friends have been complaining about the rain. "That's what you get for moving from California to the Pacific Northwest," I tell them. They're not all from California and I'm not exactly sympathetic. I like the weather here most of the time. It's generally a misty rain, not a downpour. The damp weather is the reason that Starbucks originated here and not in California. People here want to walk around with a warm drink in their hands.
When you live where it's so very green, the reason is usually lots of rain. Most of the deciduous trees outside my window have moss growing on their branches. Some even have licorice fern growing in their elbows. My boy tells me that's the understory. There are four levels to the temperate rainforest, he tells me as he points: the forest floor, the shrub layer, the understory, and the canopy. I love that I can learn from my boy. I look out my window to the understory, all verdant and dripping with jewels of raindrops. I would swear that if I put a clean rock outside in the fall, it would have moss growing on it by spring. I like that.
I didn't grow up here. This weather, even after living here for twenty years, still feels exotic to me. I grew up in the Midwest. It was dry and cold in the winter and hot and humid in the summer. The best part about where I grew up were the small steep hills that were dropped by the glaciers in the last ice age. Hills are at a premium in the Midwest. I also like that you can walk straight through the forest without a path. As a child, I used to look off into the distance and see clouds on the horizon. My mind sometimes tried to interpret them as distant mountains. Here, the mountains often look like clouds in the distance. Once in a while, I look out my window and think, 'I live here.' I try not to take it for granted.
In the Pacific Northwest, you don't walk the woods easily without a path. The sword ferns are waist deep and the rest of the brush is thick, usually with Oregon grape, bracken, thimbleberry, salal, vine maple and snowberry. Even if you're off the trail, you unknowingly push through on an animal's trail and hold your elbows at shoulder height. The ground is usually very soft and without high top shoes, your socks will get wet.
When I look up my house on Google Earth or Google Maps, Street level, all I see are trees. I can tell I'm on the right road. The satellites show my road through the trees. And I recognize our neighbor's deck. But where my house should be is green, green, green. This isn't the kind of area where you try to grow things in your yard. Instead, you try not to grow things in your yard. It's a battlefield out there, my friend. If I could hear it, I know those plants would be rushing forward, screaming, and clashing their swords in their battle for territory. Humans are not the only warriors on this planet.
When we first bought our house, I tried to climb the hill into our back yard. For every step up in the dirt, I would slide back three or four inches. When the weather got wet, it was worse. I stopped going up at all when I learned that we live in a slide zone. We are lucky that we've never had a slide behind our house, but we don't do much to the ground or plants back there any more because of our fear of destabilizing it. We were told that the mountain beaver who make little condos behind our house seem to know what is stable and what is not. I'm glad they know more about the geology here than I do. After twenty years, I have learned that our area supports two kinds of places, flood plains and slide zones. Great place for real estate, huh?
Some people here get tired of the rain. It's not a great place to live if you don't like being dripped on. It is a great place to live if you need to look out your window into the understory, with the moss, the ferns, and the nesting birds.
Thank you for listening, jb
It's raining again. My friends have been complaining about the rain. "That's what you get for moving from California to the Pacific Northwest," I tell them. They're not all from California and I'm not exactly sympathetic. I like the weather here most of the time. It's generally a misty rain, not a downpour. The damp weather is the reason that Starbucks originated here and not in California. People here want to walk around with a warm drink in their hands.
When you live where it's so very green, the reason is usually lots of rain. Most of the deciduous trees outside my window have moss growing on their branches. Some even have licorice fern growing in their elbows. My boy tells me that's the understory. There are four levels to the temperate rainforest, he tells me as he points: the forest floor, the shrub layer, the understory, and the canopy. I love that I can learn from my boy. I look out my window to the understory, all verdant and dripping with jewels of raindrops. I would swear that if I put a clean rock outside in the fall, it would have moss growing on it by spring. I like that.
I didn't grow up here. This weather, even after living here for twenty years, still feels exotic to me. I grew up in the Midwest. It was dry and cold in the winter and hot and humid in the summer. The best part about where I grew up were the small steep hills that were dropped by the glaciers in the last ice age. Hills are at a premium in the Midwest. I also like that you can walk straight through the forest without a path. As a child, I used to look off into the distance and see clouds on the horizon. My mind sometimes tried to interpret them as distant mountains. Here, the mountains often look like clouds in the distance. Once in a while, I look out my window and think, 'I live here.' I try not to take it for granted.
In the Pacific Northwest, you don't walk the woods easily without a path. The sword ferns are waist deep and the rest of the brush is thick, usually with Oregon grape, bracken, thimbleberry, salal, vine maple and snowberry. Even if you're off the trail, you unknowingly push through on an animal's trail and hold your elbows at shoulder height. The ground is usually very soft and without high top shoes, your socks will get wet.
When I look up my house on Google Earth or Google Maps, Street level, all I see are trees. I can tell I'm on the right road. The satellites show my road through the trees. And I recognize our neighbor's deck. But where my house should be is green, green, green. This isn't the kind of area where you try to grow things in your yard. Instead, you try not to grow things in your yard. It's a battlefield out there, my friend. If I could hear it, I know those plants would be rushing forward, screaming, and clashing their swords in their battle for territory. Humans are not the only warriors on this planet.
When we first bought our house, I tried to climb the hill into our back yard. For every step up in the dirt, I would slide back three or four inches. When the weather got wet, it was worse. I stopped going up at all when I learned that we live in a slide zone. We are lucky that we've never had a slide behind our house, but we don't do much to the ground or plants back there any more because of our fear of destabilizing it. We were told that the mountain beaver who make little condos behind our house seem to know what is stable and what is not. I'm glad they know more about the geology here than I do. After twenty years, I have learned that our area supports two kinds of places, flood plains and slide zones. Great place for real estate, huh?
Some people here get tired of the rain. It's not a great place to live if you don't like being dripped on. It is a great place to live if you need to look out your window into the understory, with the moss, the ferns, and the nesting birds.
Thank you for listening, jb
No comments:
Post a Comment