For the last three weeks I've lived with my parents in Canon City, Colorado. If I knew how to type a tilde over the first 'n', than I would so you'd know it sounds like Canyon City - butted up against the foothills of the Rocky Mountains and dubbed the "Banana Belt" due to its temperate weather. Not a day has gone by without either a tractor driving down the road or clusters of deer roaming through the back yard. Somedays it's both and I just thank my lucky stars. It doesn't get much more Americana. The main street, called "Main St.", is a series of buildings crammed together, a kind of time warp from cowboy days with a few low-slung 1960-1980s buildings thrown in there. It's also literally the land of dinosaurs. A cluster of bones were first discovered on a ridge of granite worn clear on the end of town, aptly named Skyline drive.
I have a long history in this town. Eighteen years to be more exact. When my parents first moved here I was 18 and starting college in the Napa valley, California. I spent my summer here, parked on a hill at night making out on the hood of my boyfriend's car and listening to Led Zepplin for the first time. I worked at the local grocery store pushing shopping carts and packing bags Trader Joe-style, a throw-back to my love of the ever-popular 90s Tetris game. The roads then were more dirt than paved, a real one-horse country town. Not much has changed.
I came here with a simple purpose and I'm happy to say that my mission is accomplished. I've worked no less than 12 hours every day I've been here. When my parents visited Oregon for 10 days, I spent 16+ hours a day working. The result is a tidy portfolio website at http://www.9spire.com, the accompanying social network expansion (online, of course), and the completion of two freelance jobs and one project for PETA. I've also received no less than twenty packages from mail-ordering everything I or Aaron might need in Manila that we can't easily get our hands on there. I remained sober, for the most part, other than a girl friend phone conversation that ran late and involved a box of wine. I slept well, ate well, worked well, and have found the quiet sometimes lonely.
Despite the accomplishment of typing this first blog entry on my new Macbook Air, the last weekend had me wanting more. Not in the same sense of a year ago, where more looked like a weekend party block that bled into my weeknights, or the same sense of where more meant a motorbike ride into the Thai mountains on a solo search for elephants, temples, and tighter curves. It was that desire for companionship, a break from the negative, self-doubting thoughts that tend to crowd my mind when I think everyone is out having a lot of fun without me. Thank goodness that has now passed.
I'm grateful to my parents, who have provided me with this space and time to essentially take over their living room and dining room. Who were generous with their praise when I mowed their lawn and left it looking like a drunk alien trying to make crop circles, who continue to teach me what it is to be human and try to always do the best they can. I feel like I will be leaving here happier and healthier than when I arrived. And a bit fatter.
What's next is what has had me working so hard, sleeping so hard, eating so much. I feel like the squirrel before winter, with all of my nuts assembled on the living room rug and waiting to be put into suitcases and measured. The next adventure. Further yet from the community of which I am still fractionally a part of in Portland, with an end-date even I don't know yet. The differences this time are marked. I have this lovely portfolio, a lot more stability, a ever-deepening relationship with a partner I'm genuinely excited about (that in its self is terrifying), and a year's worth of experience between what I consider my lowest point in my life and now.
It's 9:42pm, and I think quickly approaching my bedtime.