Goodbye Training Wheels, Hello Unknown Future

Well, gulp, I moved out of the farm house today.  Now I'm in a warm little room at McMenamin's fucking party lodge in Forest Grove, on a king-sized bed next to my mother, who is in a bathrobe reading the New Yorker.  Just drank a very alcoholic, very necessary beer and am about to dive back into Where'd You Go, Bernadette--a fantastically funny new novel and one of three books I'm juggling at the moment.

So we did it.  This morning we packed up some boxes with frying pans, basketballs and stereos and schlepped them over to Portland Storage (best place of its kind in the county, I imagine).  After lunch at Syun Izakaya (best Japanese food in Washington county, I assure you) Mom and I took some quality naps and then loaded up the car, strapped on the bike rack and said goodbye to dear Anne, René and Q-ball at Gales Meadow.  

What a wonderful summer it was -- my first taste of plucking food from the ground and cooking it (sometimes I would even skip the rinsing).  I learned so much at the farm, and it will always hold a treasured place in my memory.  So much else happened this summer, so many fun times I can only now begin to recall in retrospect...good thing I have a blog where it's all recorded in stone.

The future looks like goat cheese.  I may spend six months in the Middle of Nowhere, Oregon this winter and spring learning to make the delicious stuff.  And I'll even get paid to do it.  I am so excited by this prospect.  Excited, anxious and mystified by the abstractness of it all right now.  I will be visiting the farm tomorrow where I might be working, on our ride from Portland to Oakland.

Tomorrow at 8:30 AM Mom and I will hit the road with a huge tub of Wessels honey, a growler of McMenamin's seasonal Porter and a garlic braid to keep us company...and south we shall go.  Hoping to make it as far as Dunsmuir before calling it quits for the day.  Then a couple days after that I'll be off to New York, where I will see my dearest Peter and then to Rome, Italy for a week.  Poor me.

Well if there's anything I know, it's that the future holds good things and the past does as well.  Thanks to all the wonderful people who made my stay in Forest Grove this summer such a pleasure...Anne, René, Adam, Laura & Davey, Mattie, Jeremy, Laurel, Heather, Lis, Frannie, Steve, Clare, Clémence...it's been great.  See y'all in 2013.

Until then ~~ all my love!

-Lucy, the plucky peasant