chronicles of she

i have searched elusively with greater and lesser fervency through my years for My Place. that utopian city my brain created during childhood where my fictional friends lived, such as clifford the big red dog, curious george, madeline and even harold and the purple crayon. it is this egalitarian city where people of all different skin colors ride on buses together and fathers walk home instead of driving from the grocery store with their children carrying paper instead of plastic grocery bags. a city where parks are abundant and lush, where the market is just steps away and where you can live in a beautiful home and a beautiful neighborhood and still be within a walkable distance from a quaint, fancy restaurant. a place where women walk to the coffee shop with their dogs on leashes. a city free of excessive traffic congestion, cozy, tree-lined streets for miles, and people riding bicycles as a legitimate means of transportation. a city with rows of shops, where you can find a yarn store, a handmade toy store, and a cozy bookstore all on the same block.

but what i received from the area where i grew up was lots of parking lots. it was unthinkable to get around by bicycle. i vividly remember the one black kid in my seventh grade english class and the two asian girls in my elementary school (at least in my childhood brain they were asian) because every other face i saw in real life was white. bringing groceries home meant lots and lots of plastic bags in the back of the car. it seemed close that the nearest grocery store or gas station was only three miles away mostly because the nearest shopping mall was fifteen miles away. and this wasn't some rural town, this was a well populated suburban city! riding the bus was frightening and unfriendly and using it came with the assumption that something was wrong with your life. if you wanted to find yarn, you would look in the craft section of the super store a few miles from your house. if you wanted to visit a park, you got in the car and drove there, though most people only visited for a planned church activity or family reunion since everyone had backyards anyway.

the reality of the area where i grew up slowly shattered my childhood vision of what living in a wonderful city meant. i was always pining for somewhere new, somewhere different. utah became my winnipeg (cue the weakerthans). i began to wonder if that place in my mind did exist. the disconnect was confusing, especially because the message i received at school, church, and from friends and family was that utah, centerville and davis county specifically, was one of the greatest places to live on. this. earth. in high school, my friends and i would dream about quitting our suburban restaurant jobs and moving away to somewhere new. i traveled to new places with my family growing up but never found a place that was inviting to stay.

so when i was eighteen i moved to new york city. in my head, it was THE city; the epitome of city living, the apex of the american big city dream. when i got there, my mind was blown. life changed. i fell in love with that place with all of it's you've-got-mail charm. but it still wasn't my place. it was it's own place that i did love, but it wasn't that place i didn't know i was searching for. something about it was too loud, too busy, too much comings and goings, too much city. i loved all the too-much for exactly what it was. something has always kept me coming back to nyc and i think that something will probably never go away. but it wasn't my place.

like i said, i have elusively searched with greater and lesser fervency for this place throughout my life. each time i visit somewhere new, my radar is on and i'm constantly evaluating if it could be the place, or even close enough. i've tried to fool myself into believing i've found it in the different cities where i've lived. i have momentarily given up on ever finding the place, citing all my visions to being fictional from children's books, you know, too idealized, too perfected, too dreamy to ever really exist.

but this last week in portland has been something else. now, i'm not going to say that i'm living in a children's book where everything has a picture perfect ending and i have found the truly perfect city. because if that were the case there wouldn't be any tasteless lime green cadillacs with lifted wheels rolling through town or meth houses or people without homes in portland.

but there have been the tree-lined streets for miles and yarn shops and legitimate-means-of-transportation cyclists and colorful bus rides and indubitably friendly people and fancy restaurants embedded into cozy neighborhoods and our fair share of walking home from the market with paper bags.

the other day out of nowhere i told jared that it feels like we are in the big city curious george visits and suddenly this post and 'the elusive pursuit of My Place' all came together in my brain and i knew that portland was in many ways, as many ways a real life place could be, My Place. i'm apprehensive because i don't want anyone to read into this and it's only a silly, light-hearted blog post and we've only been here a week and we aren't going to stay because i do have school that i must finish. and a place can change before your eyes and we could come back in a year and decide it's not what we want then. but i do keep telling jared i would buy a house here and i NEVER want to buy a house anywhere. most often, i am plagued wondering why anyone would want to buy a house anywhere.

but this, this place is something else, i tell you. this place is all sorts of good. i believe i have found my place and this is saying something.

ps. if you're wondering, the pink is still here. these images are from last week (: