Portland « Courtney Tait

The Saskatchewan River, March 2013

Three summers ago I boarded a bus in South Korea, heading to a festival in a town called Boryeong. I wasn’t thinking about husbands. I was thinking about the beach ahead, and the beer in my bag. If one of the friends with me had said, ”Your future husband’s gonna be on this bus,” I would have laughed; I would have bet my life he probably wasn’t.

My future husband sat three rows behind me. If his eyes hadn’t been as blue or if I had taken a different bus on a different day, we probably would never have met. But his eyes were blue and they were beaming. I saw them, kept turning around from my seat three rows ahead to see them again.

The new plant Melissa and Steve gave us on their visit last weekend. It’s called Kalanchoe blossfeldiana. Isn’t it lovely?

In two days a year will have passed since I flew to India, since I left Korea, since I stepped in cow dung on the broken concrete outside our hotel in Delhi’s Paharganj. The skin of my foot was bare against my sandal’s straps; an Indian boy offered to wipe it with torn newspaper from the incense stand beside us. Those shoes are gone now. I left them somewhere in the south, I think, once the straps became so loose my toes began to slip over the edge.

In Portland the tree outside our balcony is naked. Its leaves disappeared somewhere between October and November, when the winter crept in, threatening to stamp out the flickers of light that were sparked inside me last May, when I leaned against Joe on the backs of motorcycles, sun blazing our necks, winding past Land For Sale signs in Lombok, Indonesia, green, green, surrounding us all the way to the horizon.

Courtney Tait

Writer. Editor. Lover of Words.

Category Archives: Portland

On Patience. And Spring in Saskatoon. And Meeting my Future Husband.

On Transitions. And the West Coast. And a Bunch of Other Stuff.

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