Last night was our last evening in Portland together for a while, and so we spent it pleasantly--driving into town for sushi, then strolling around the West End, where we marveled at the giant mansions and the sun setting over the container ships and the strip malls and the river (the timber barons of old liked to build their houses to overlook their works, so the landscape remains a strange amalgam of remotely rich/rudely commercial), and Tom reminisced about which ones he'd renovated, and we ambled over to a jazz show at the Portland Conservatory of Music, where we sat for an hour and a half in a former church and watched two young men putter among cords and knobs and murmur into drums and wind instruments via loops and samples to create a shimmer of sound, and then we wandered back to our car, and then drove across town to home, to our final bit of wakefulness on the couch, with Peter Gunn and the cat. 

It was completely sweet, and the convolutions of the sentence are a nod to the perambulations of time and our feet, and I woke up this morning ready for two weeks of a new way of being friends. The last time we were separated for so long was when Tom moved to Portland for a job and to look for a house to buy, and I stayed in Harmony to deal with selling the house we had, and he was living in a horrible rooming situation, and I was so lonely and grieving that I did not know how I would survive. But this time he is going back north for two weeks as a celebrated artist, and I am not selling my trees and packing my books into boxes; instead, I am planting a garden, and writing in my room, and visiting with friends, and  doing my work, and all the while knowing that Tom is doing his and being so happy for him.