There’s a joke, it seems, about the first good weather in Portland after the winter; that it makes everyone in the city overreact, and respond as if they’ve never seen sun before. It’s a recurring bit because it’s true; this year, the first sunny day in weeks if not months — which was also accompanied by some genuine warmth, unusually but welcomely — was greeted by anecdotal reports of parents taking their kids out of school to enjoy it, of people taking time off work to escape to the countryside to take advantage of it, and firsthand experience of people walking past the house in t-shirts and grins, acting as if they’ve somehow escaped true horror and entered a utopia entirely unexpectedly.
I’m one to talk, though; I finished work and walked to the local park, determined to both clear my head of the static of the workday and take advantage of the good weather while it was around,. What I found there was thrilling in ways that I should have expected, but didn’t — the entire place, filled with the cast of characters I hadn’t seen there in months, every single one of us ready and eager to return to a warmer norm where we play our pre-determined roles with enthusiasm and, dare I say, gusto.
There were the dog walkers, with barely-constrained pups thrilled to see each other and be in the same space again; there were the stoners, and the goths, and the skaters, all assembling and quietly conferring amongst their own groups and suspiciously looking at everyone else. There were the dancers, those exuberant and confusing folk who just have to move even though there’s no music to hear, and then there were their opposites, the people who just sit silently and look at the ducks in the pond. There were the joggers, with a number looking dangerously red-faced, and the tree worshippers, and the people who might be having a picnic but there’s no food and so it’s unclear what they’re actually doing…
I’m part of my own group, of course; I’m a walker — one of those people who just like moving through the park at our own rate, watching everything, seemingly restless and purposeless. I do it alone, usually, listening to music and decompressing mentally. It’s a simple pleasure, but a sincere one, and I know I’m just as much a cliche and subsect as anyone else there. That was perhaps what made that particular walk such a joy: the feeling of fitting back into an eco-system I hadn’t even thought about in so long, and of belonging, once again.
More than the weather, that was what made the walk so special. The sense of once again rejoining a larger world outside my front door.