Desolate Feeling

I returned to the Coast at night from her Portland Memorial. It was full of kind, friendly people I hadn’t seen in fifteen years. I was glad to be back home. In rapidly dying Portland, there was much talk of Covid and where to live as the world changed. Conditions in the City, Powell Blvd 50th to I-205 shocked me.

I awoke in the morning shuffling sleepily and filled by an oddly desolate feeling. As if it were a premonition, my mind simply would not stop working of my first waking thought: “...lucky ladies left standing soaking in a cold acid rain listening to an ammunition train rumble in the distance.”

I went straight down stairs, put on my slippers went outside and stood the Stars and Stripes up in the sun and the blowing Northwest Trades where it belongs.