Our Temporary House is on the very outskirts of Portland, right before it dissolves into suburbs and outlying towns with names like “Happy Valley” and “Boring.” (Yes, seriously.) Our neighborhood has three kinds of houses. There are old farmhouses with fenced-in, fading lawns that replaced the farms when the city gradually began to swell and then overtook them. There are the standard suburban models building in numbers ever since the 1970s, some of them no more visually appealing than pastel, pre-fab cardboard boxes (and probably not much sturdier), some of them only slightly smaller than McMansions. Last are the mass-produced houses cranked out just prior to the housing bust, crammed into any spare acre and built only a few feet apart from each other. They bring to mind squatty, low-budget versions of San Francisco’s Painted Ladies, all near mirror-images and differentiated only by their muted colors. Many of them sit empty, “For Sale” signs planted in their front yards.
Running here is harder than I wanted it to be. Being in a new city was supposed to mean that I had new running routes to explore, that everyday I could wake up, run in a new direction and see something I hadn’t seen a million times before. But America’s best city for bikes is apparently less friendly towards runners–or at least it is here, where there are rarely sidewalks and every street is two blocks long, ending in a cul-de-sac. Children play in the yards or in the middle of the streets, and when I jog past, a little boy ask sme if I’m training for the Portland Marathon.
I laugh. “Not quite yet.”
He calls after me, “Well, good, ’cause you’re going the wrong way.”
I’m doing this new thing where I don’t look at numbers: the number on the scale, the number on the nutritional label, the number on my watch when I get done with a run. When I start looking at the numbers, I always get lost. I get haunted by the idea of more and more and more, or less and less and less, until the world is seen in terms of “nothing” or “everything.” It’s a hard habit to break. In Madison, it would have been impossible. There, I’d committed to memory the exact length of all my running routes to the tenth of a mile. Here, it’s still hard not to let myself estimate. Years ago, I memorized the calorie counts to almost everything. I’ve since stopped, but I could still tell you the exact number of calories in most of the things I eat. It’s one of those things that always hangs out in the back of my head, making me feel bad.
After spending years trying to ignore my body, it’s going to be hard to learn how to pay attention to it. But I’m trying.
So when I run, I run without a sense of mileage or direction. I go wherever I want to go. I pay attention to the things around me, and try not to get too lost. There are hydrangeas everywhere here, powder blue, the size of basketballs. Down the street, there is a hospice, a sprawling, Spanish-style building painted bright pink. In the parking lot, there are boxy hedges framing a statue of the Virgin Mary. Out behind our Temporary House, there is a field with a few apple trees, all of them shedding apples all over the ground. Someone has raked all the apples into a waist-high pile in the middle of the field, and there they lie, the entire field reeking of rotting fruit.
