Birthday Shenanigans

This dear holy fool is 73 today. This being of kindness and hilarity, poetry and hiraeth/saudade (because she is both Welsh and Portuguese, with the DNA to prove it) has stumbled delightedly through one more year. She pretended to dismiss the whole thing, "I'm really not into birthdays." But I nagged a bit, nudged, pried, and poked. Finally she decided that what she wanted for her birthday was a waterfall.

We found ten, four of which we got around to seeing. Silver Falls State Park is only about an hour and a half from Portland, and if we'd been up to a seven-mile hike we could have seen all ten waterfalls. After the easy ones and a picnic of odds and ends under impossibly high Douglas Firs, we strolled through the Oregon Garden, which is bursting with spring flowers, humming with bees, and full of warbling birds. Finally we had dinner in Silverton, overhanging a creek. Our drink was lemonade with a generous lacing of marionberry compote. 

I'm into birthdays, and shhhhh, don't tell anybody: so is Sue.