well well well

I'm baaaack!

Somehow, over the past seven days, my life has jumped from farm to town to wilderness to suburb. I don't pretend to understand it -- frankly, my brain is confused and saddened and excited and bewildered -- but here I am.

Rewind to last Sunday. The name of the game: TomatoFest. Yes, that's right -- TomatoFest. Alison and I stuck around Teal Creek long enough to witness the sweet fruits of our labor. On Sunday we swept out the hay shed, rigged up some tarps, and broke out the wine glasses. Sloan and Keith invite ~30 of their closest friends to the shindig for some snacks, drinks, and well-loved tomato plants. We (wo)manned the cash register, saying goodbye to our tomatoes as customers scooped them to new homes. Since I had last checked, the plants had -- wowsers! -- started to bear fruit. Take, for instance, these Siletz tomatoes, which I transplanted myself:

Yayyyy tomatoes!  I'm so proud of these little guys, I almost kissed them.  But I didn't.  Because someday someone will eat them, which only makes me prouder.  It's a difficult cycle to deal with.

Sunday was also our last day on the farm, so Alison and I crazily packed and wandered and meditated outside on the goodness of the life we had.  Monday we climbed aboard the train to Portland, arriving with what felt like thousands of pounds of junk in tow.  We ran around like maniacs to prep for our hiking trip, stopping only for delicious (I mean really, really, really good) cupcakes to soothe our brains and bellies.

Enter Tuesday, and enter THE HIKE.  When we first planned this little five-month jaunt, Alison and I knew instinctively that we absolutely had to go backpacking, and we absolutely had to do in the Columbia Gorge.  So we did.  And it was amazing.  We hitched a ride to the trail with the one and only Adam, a moderator/photographer for the Portland Hikers Forum.  The three of us and Thea (his daughter) hiked the first 3ish miles together, stopping to take pictures of things, like this:

And this:

(I know, goob-tastic, but don't hate.)

So ... to summarize the rest of that three day hike:  LOTS OF BEAUTIFUL WATERFALLS, and LOTS OF UNEXPECTED, VERY COLD RAIN.  We were, in essence, rained out -- standing water in the tent, all our clothes soaked through to the point of smelling like 1000 wet dogs locked in a tiny closet, the works.  It was so so so so wet.  I have never been so wet in my life.  My rainshell decided to stop being a shell and instead be a sponge, so that was less than helpful.  However, even with all this -- and granted, I tend to look on the past with rose-colored glasses -- it was great.  Once we hitched a ride back to town with a lovely older couple, ate delicious foodcart foodies in North Portland, and graciously accepted the ride to the very front door of our hostel, and we took showers and changed clothes and ate big bowls of soup for dinner, I was amazed.  The trail was truly beautiful, and walking with your home on your back (turtle, anyone?) is really empowering.  I loved it.  I hope to do it again.  In a drier way.

So! Return from the trail, become dry/less smelly humans, eat tapas and board a plane.  That is essentially what happened.

Now I am magically back in suburbia, watching my parents iron things and take showers ONCE A DAY (wild stuff) and sleeping on a mattress, but tomorrow we shall pack up our lives in a car and drive all the merry way to Boston.  Unreal.  The pace of life is unreal.

Also unreal:  everything.  I didn't realize that returning from a mostly rural existence to a mostly concrete one would be so hard.  My mom bought strawberries today and I realized they didn't come from the backyard.  Gone are the days of dogs and lambies and hearing naturesounds.  Now I look out my bedroom window and hear something that .. well ... I'm sure it MUST be nature, but it just doesn't sound as convincing as it does with a pasture in the background. 

I suppose I sort of know where my food comes from, but I think I'm understanding more thoroughly how I DON'T know it.  The barriers that stand between the Koppa kitchen table and the bed of lettuce Alison and I planted from seed.  How the natural world here is manicured and overwatered and chosen for its precise color palettes instead of what happens without trying, what blooms without need for a designer.  In essence, I think, I'm stuck.  I don't know where the hell I am, how I got here, and how this world is connected (if at all) to the one I just left.

I'm working on it.