Sunday, June 27, 2010

Summer has finally hit in Oregon. The clouds that have filled the Willamette valley for six months have been replaced by 14 hours of sunlight and ridiculously amazing views of mountains on both horizons. Everyone is outside and the ER has been full of native oregonians wondering why their skin has been turning brown.
We have been gleefully inundated with visiting family and friends. Right now Tiffany's mother and grandmother are here and I've had the rare pleasure of spending time with four generations of a family. There's a genuine enthusiasm for life that runs through her family and watching Stella get to explore the beaches and forests with her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother leaves me quietly overjoyed.
Tiffany's grandmother is a rare breed of woman. I met her several years ago when she came to Lexington to visit Tiffany. I had gotten a chocolate bar out of the cabinet and asked her if she'd like some chocolate. She said "yes, thank you" and then took the bar and put it in her purse. Yesterday we were all looking out over the ocean on a trail and she turned around to realize that Tiffany and her mother had already moved onto the next viewpoint. She turned around and jogged to catch up to them. I am amazed by her energy. She hasn't put up a fuss about being shuttled around in a oversized and overdecorated van and always seems to have an interesting story to tell. I recognized her sense of adventure in TIffany when Tiffany and I rented one of those fringe-roofed, four-wheeled, two person, bicycle tourist contraptions to explore Portland's riverfront. Thanks to some traffic detours around a festival we ended up accidentally merging onto a highway with out a bike lane and had to retreat offroad down a steep hill to get back to the bike lane with Stella bouncing around in the front basket.
The reflection off of the lens of the lighthouse at Yaquina bay, an hour west of Corvallis

Tiffany and I have been wondering if Stella will lack the sense of family and connection that we both associate with a southern upbringing (I never considered myself southern until I moved out here, but everyone here thinks an accent means you live on a plantation and eat okra) A lot of the experiences particular to our geographic upbringing have informed our notions of "normal" in a way that seems uncommon here. I think about going to the state fair and listening to a guy with a megaphone attract crowds with an offer of "a free flying-weasel window-sticker and a chance to talk to a real-life Budweiser girl." At age seven, I wasn't sure exactly what a Budweiser girl was or why she was wearing a swimsuit, but to her credit I have always had a deep and undying love for beer. Tiffany contributes the example of her cousin's friend named "Mater", short for "Tomato", short for "Tomato-head" for a congenital heart defect that made his face turn red when he got excited. Even at work the differences here are fairly astonishing. So far, after a year in the ER here, I have only had one patient drunkenly threaten me for somehow insulting his manly dignity by sewing up his scalp. His address: Winchester, Kentucky. No kiddin'.

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