February is usually a time when Portlanders know nothing of the sun, nor the warmth it brings. I’ve lived my whole life in Portland and I can hardly remember a February that was optimistic, that the sun was strong enough to break through the cloud cover and remind us we hadn’t been forgotten. I believe this is something Northwesterners worry about. What if the sun never came back? We wait and we wait and the sun decides the Caribbean is better and takes an extended vacation. Don’t laugh, Florida. This is a legit fear.
See, as a sun worshipper, I bitch. I bitch a lot. Then what am I doing here? Well, where else do I belong? This is Portland. I bitch and say I need sun, I need San Diego, I need Santa Cruz, I need New Orleans. But this is Portland and Portland is meant to be inhabited by a very select type. I happen to fit the description. So here I stay, and here I bitch, and here I worship the sun.
On Friday the sun surprised us. Like pasty gremlins we emerged from the depths of our caves, hands shielding our faces, our dark, sunken in eyes adjusting, blinking, squinting. Holy shit, batman, is that what I think it is? The strangest part? It didn’t leave. Through the weekend, and into today, the sun rejoiced with us. Girls wearing flip-flips and tank-tops and boys in shorts and though maybe still a tad chilly for these things, we didn’t care. I drove around in my MX-5 with the top down, I played Jason Mraz like it was 2009 (that was a good year, though any year is a good year with Jason) and I held my hands up going down 205. This is the life, I thought.
Sunday afternoon, while the sun hung low in the sky, I sat on the riverbank with my dad and said, “it’ll go away.” My dad said, “definitely. But it always comes back.” And I know we were both talking about something other than the sun, but I nodded and sipped my chai, and he his latte, and we watched as the sun dipped lower and lower behind the West Linn tree line and the Willamette river went dark without the bright reflections.
Today I drove home with the top up and tiny rain drops spattered across my window. I wasn’t surprised. I wasn’t even disappointed, because this is how it is and how we knew it would be. Tomorrow we’ll look up and the sky wont be blue, but grey and that’s O.K. because this is Portland, and our funky mood swings and wet streets, and terribly inaccurate weather men are what make this our city.
Keep Portland Weird.
Enjoy every minute,
Mary
Mary
