Category: Street & Travel

Two Good Pups

Our dog Ellie sits beside a mural containing a dog named Pepper in the Irvington neighborhood of Portland, Oregon in November 2017

With the cooler weather of fall, Ellie doesn’t tire so easily and has been up for longer walks. Anti-inflammatory medicine and pain pills help with her advancing arthritis too. Since I’ve been home most mornings after getting laid off a few weeks ago, I’ve been able to take her on lots of long walks, a real treat since who knows how many more we’ll get together. She still enjoys going to see if her buddy Steve is out on his porch, as he gives her treats, but he’s only been out once. He mentioned that he was the caretaker of a man who just died and they weren’t sure if they were going to move someone else in for him to look after, or move him somewhere else and do some renovations on the house. Fortunately Ellie can’t hear well and thus is unaware her buddy might be moving.

Not far from Steve’s house is this mural on the side of a dialysis center that I frequently walked past on the way home from the train, so I was pleased to be able to get a picture of Ellie next to the perpetually smiling Pepper. I wasn’t sure if I’d get the picture even though she wanted to come down this way on multiple days (mostly I think to double back to give him Steve a second chance to be on his porch), as the blinds in the window above Pepper were open and I didn’t want the people inside getting treatment to worry about why someone outside was taking pictures. On this day though the blinds were drawn and I got my picture of the two good pups.

This Old House

The doorknob to my closet lit by a reddish sun

Normally we don’t get such reddish light filtering into my office as the sun is blocked from view when it is low in the western sky, but smoke from a massive forest fire in the Gorge colored the light before the sun sank behind the trees, softly illuminating the door to my closet.

Train in the Rain

A MAX Red Line train at the NE 7th Avenue station in Portland, Oregon

While waiting for the Blue Line on my way to work on a rainy day in the middle of October, I took some pictures of a Red Line train that pulled into the station. Two weeks later my entire team got laid off, and even if I can find a job in the Portland area it’s most likely I’ll have to drive to get there. It took me a while to edit these pictures as it made me sad to look at them, knowing my time on the MAX is likely over. I rode the trains the majority of the fifteen years we’ve lived in Portland, and while it wasn’t always a happy relationship during stretches when the service wasn’t reliable, in general it took a lot of stress out of my daily commute.

A MAX Red Line train on a rainy day at the NE 7th Avenue station in Portland, Oregon

The Door I Walk Past

Graffiti covers a door and walls in Portland, Oregon

We’ve lived in Portland for fifteen years and for most of that time I’ve walked past this door every day on my way to work. Except I can promise you I’ve never walked past this door, at least not until a few days ago when it caught my eye. I’ll grant you I’m not the most observant person, but even so I know I haven’t walked past this door. And I haven’t. I found a picture online from last summer that showed the graffiti wasn’t present then, it was a beige door in a brown building, tucked in a little cubbyhole between businesses on Broadway, the door I had walked past for so many years. I made a point to photograph it as soon as I could as it will soon be dark in the mornings, and who knows, maybe beige and brown too.

If You See Something, Share Something

A public space for art in a neighborhood yard

While there are multiple homes in the neighborhood that post poetry, this one has a glass enclosure for anyone in the neighborhood to place something to share. On this day of record-breaking heat in early September, someone had placed a lost hat on top. Or perhaps a deliberately discarded hat, given the record-breaking heat.