Midlife Meditation

If you lived in Portland in the early 2000s, you may have seen a bumper sticker with the legend "Bring Major League Baseball to Portland," and this logo: The umbrella plays off Portland's reputation for rainfall, but does it in a distinctly un-Portland way. While our city does have plenty of rainy days, the precipitation is rarely of the drenching variety, and realizing that, Portlanders tend not to carry umbrellas. Yes, we'll wear water-resistant jackets (we also eschew true raincoats), but no bumbershoots for us, thank you very much. Carrying an umbrella on a typically misty Portland day almost guarantees  one to be an out-of-towner, in fact. We're so inured to rain that it comes as a surprise how unprepared we are to drive in it. The first rainy day after a dry spell sees far more accidents on the highway than rainfolk should be having. Add a cold snap, and things become nightmarish; which is why freezing rain shuts this city down. I was supposed...

Portlanders are calling it Snowmageddon and Snowpocalypse. And yes, it is quite a winter storm: snow that turned my usual 35-minute commute into two hours Thursday afternoon; wind that knocked limbs off trees; more snow that closed schools yesterday, and continues to disrupt business today; and now freezing rain on top of that. It will probably be tomorrow night before the Willamette Valley starts to thaw out. And it will. Which is why the "mageddon" and "pocalypse" suffixes are just plain silly. Three and a half days of playing in the snow (which is what Amy and I did yesterday and today, both skiing and snowshoeing our neighborhood) do not the end of the world make. I do have to admit that this weather is out of the ordinary. The last time I lost a full day of work to a snowstorm was December, 2008. Of course, then it was a full week, and the snow and cold continued for a second week, disrupting the Christmas holiday. I was trapped in Forest Grove for that s...