Welcome

Eight years ago this month I drove from Houston to Portland, hauling everything I owned in my 2003 Saturn with a “Teach Peace” bumper sticker. Exhausted from forty-five years of grading papers and battling migraines, I retired at sixty-two, down-sized to nearly nothing, and headed for a place I picked off the internet. I knew nobody in Portland. I knew only that it rained most of the year but was neither too hot nor too cold, and I could get into subsidized housing. According to the articles I found, it had a good library, good public transportation. It was “progressive,” it had a gay community and a great bookstore. 

I bought myself a new journal, and in the front of it I wrote my dream:

Cool gray skies, a park bench, 
black turtle neck, battered jeans, 
old shoes: I will lean back, arms crossed, 
not having to prove myself, not having
to compete or achieve, anonymous 
and silent in the city of roses.

I arrived, signed for the key to an apartment I had never seen, inflated the airbed, and slept for two days. On the third day I went out for a walk and the plum trees had burst into bloom, something I hadn’t expected, something the internet articles hadn’t mentioned. Plum trees littered the streets with tiny pink petals. Plum trees like a parade of very tall flower girls scattered petals under my weary feet, saying, “Welcome, Kendall. This is your new home.” From then on, it just got better.