i am in portland, being antisocial for a minute because i have been writing in my new superman notebook for days and not putting any of it anywhere and that is silly. also because contrary to popular belief, it only takes two people to roast a chicken and root vegetables (not three). yesterday i bought The Diaries of Virginia Woolf and i am only about fourteen pages in, but on page nine Virginia says "life piles up so fast that i have no time to write out the equally fast rising mound of reflections." what truth! i am glad to be reading not just Virginia's fictions, but her inner workings. i think we are two peas in a pod of thoughts.

being with my girl cousins is a warm easy feeling. i wonder if every family has the same amount of commonality as ours does. when windsor and savannah and i are together, it is like three slightly refracted sections of the same mirror. we all look different, but windsor looks like grandma and savannah looks like kitty and i look like little polly, so in a pinch we all look like welches. we all have the same little voice and the same times that we want to be reading or writing or sewing or eating or sleeping, when we want to be making plans or when we want to be being spontaneous, and we want to be eating the same things. when we are all together, our little voices begin to rise and fall in the same cadence. we play rumikub and sink into an ageless state somewhere between eternal childhood and worn responsibility. we like the same skies for taking pictures of and have sweet teeth at the same time. it's bizarre and wonderful to have grown up and spent time in such different places and regardless to know that out there, in our respective niches, we are all a little colony of welches holding similar hopes and regrets, our lives and emotions falling in similar arcs and rhythms. it is good to be with them.

portland reminds me a lot of buffalo. hipper, and bigger, and fewer old houses, and more white people per square inch - but still, a lot like it. andrew and i have always had lots of conversations about portland and buffalo and how we feel about them, respectively, and what with the rush of hipsters and fine coffee shops pulsing their way west, i always suspected that he was wrong about their similarities. but sure enough, they're here. same wide open skies, same schema of buildings and defunct signs. same water and industry along it, same old iron railroad bridges. except here, the grain elevators hold more than the bones of their industrial past, and here, the light rail runs along the top of the railroad bridge. it feels like a strange, newer, busier, less ignited version of home. i like it a whole lot.

last night we went to eat at windsor's boyfriend's restaurant, and had the best mussels of my life and a chocolate chip cookie baked in a cast iron pan. windsor made the curtains and someone else made the tabletops, and the chandeliers came from someone's oregon farmhouse, and the food and light were warm and friendly, and the wine was called love and squalor.

tomorrow i go back to seattle on the bus. monday i go outside of seattle to see gigantic trees and worship at the altar of david lynch. tuesday i repack my pack and mail my cell phone home to my parents, and wednesday i get on a too-long flight over the north pole to see who knows what exactly, yet.

i still want to write about savannah (the place) and will before it is a too-distant memory. for now, i am going to put on my wool socks and eat pickles while we wait for dinner to be ready, and look out the window at the wide, wide purple sky.