17 November 2021

Sur La Mer (our 31st Anniversary) Part 50: The End of the Road

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The corner of Winter and Gaines Streets in north Salem ... That's the trip, my friends, those of you who have followed my string of babble and photos on this meagrely-read blog, I'm grateful to you.

For me, and for all I know, for my wife as well, a trip to the Coast and returning to the Valley have a certain bittersweet despair to it, and for me, it always has. You're back inland, it was cool and bracing and it's now warm and a little stultifying; such is the contempt that familiarity brings, and the northern half of the Willamette Valley is the literal ground from which I sprung, some patches of that dirt I literally know as well as parts of my very own body.

So, here it is: a picture of a modern street sign on a corner in sleepy residential North Salem, just a few blocks away from the house my wife lived in when I met her (an area she can still find her way about blindfolded, I'm sure)

It's still a damn fine place to spend ones' life, this part we know today as a part of northwestern Oregon, but compared to the Oregon Coast, everything seems a little lacklustre, at least for a while.

And so it goes.



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