4am in Spokane

So I took Torren to work this morning, because I needed the car. On the way home I heard a song called “I Went Back to Ohio.” At 4am it seemed ironic. I need to look it up, although apparently it's an older song. I also learned that at 4 in the morning the grocery store next to our apartment building is baking for the day, so everything smells faintly of bread and donuts. This is one more thing I can say I like about Spokane. Torren thinks that Spokane hit its peak in the early nineties and has never fully recovered. In some ways this is true, some of the buildings do have a nineties edge to them, and some of the people do as well. But I like Spokane. It is clean here. And considerably safer. Walking home from a bar at 3am is par for the course, your only concern being the occasional meth addict. But they’ll only rob you, and so far I haven’t seen any, though my friend Melisa is dieing to get a picture of one. I like it a lot downtown. Its well within walking distance and in the middle of it is a park where the waterfall is. The park is very green, and sprawling, and there is a goat statue there that eats trash. It’s fantastic.

WA

Sometimes, I forget that I am in Washington. I will be somewhere very ordinary, like at Target looking at towels or at JCPenney searching for a zip up hoody (I left my black one in Ohio, and it's cold here), and I will see something out of the corner of my eye. A little thing perhaps; a wisp of dark hair, glasses frames, and I will forget. I will forget that it could not possibly be my aunt Debbie turning the corner with an overflowing cart, that my mother is not holding those placemats. I forget that Jenny is in class and Emily is teaching school, and that all of these things are happening thousands of miles away. No one I know is nearby. And then I go outside, and I see foothills and unfamiliar parking lots, and I remember. I am in Washington.
This feeling has become more complicated with Torren's arrival last Monday. Sometimes now he will be the one coming around the corner, and I will not look twice at him, thinking he is in my imagination. And other times, when I see him walking next to me through the grocery store, it seems all the more apparent that the elderly woman who just stopped in the bakery must be my grandmother, and that someone I know will happen around the corner at any minute. But no one ever does.