Homeward Bound

Decided in just the last day or two to head over the mountains to Bend, Oregon for the 4th of July holiday.

I have many emotions about this, since I grew up in Bend and graduated from high school there. I associate this community with my mother--strongly--and just being there, in the dry desert air spiked with the smell of juniper and sage, the memories are always overwhelming.

I can count on one hand the number of times I've been to Bend since the summer after my mom died. That summer I lived with her friend Ruth, cleaned hotel rooms Wednesday through Sunday, and sorted through the mountain of household possessions she had left in a storage unit at the edge of town. I rolled and totaled my car--actually my mom's car--in July and I had a big garage sale in August. Then I headed back to school in Iowa and hardly looked back.

When we realized in 2003 that we weren't going to make it in Canada, we considered moving to Bend. But that was the boom time and there was no way to afford the housing, so we settled for Portland. Now Bend is going through a rough patch. The front page of the Sunday Oregonian this week was about the foreclosures and unemployment there. When I left Bend in 1987, the population was 17,000. Now I guess it pushes 80,000--ultimately an unsustainable growth rate.

I took the kids to Bend a couple of years ago. Don't remember why. I might have had a job interview. But The Artist has never been there. When we go to Topeka, Kansas, he has a million stories--"that's the fence I jumped when running from the cops" and "that's the office building I cleaned late at night, when I was just 13."

The places in my stories don't exist anymore. I think the Circle K is some other convinience store. The Pilot Butte Motor Inn isn't on the visitor bureau's Web site. The old lumber mill is now The Old Mill District. Even Mirror Pond is having issues with rapid sedimentation.

But I'm still looking forward to the visit. I'm hoping to stay with Ruth again, but have hedged my bets with a deposit on a vacation rental. We'll participate in the Pet Parade and see the fireworks. I'll reconnect with old friends and make some new memories with my family. Good times.