Manzanita

The coastal town of Manzanita retracts during the winter. After the dark rains of January, February blossoms like a sunny daffodil poking its head from the hard dirt. We are also freshly awake, as we walk the same route down to the surf, a new spring in our steps. The street is sparse of people, and we nod at those we see and proffer the “locals” wave, a hip level forward or fanning movement, our hands like one of those Japanese beckoning cats, Maneki-neko, purchased on Canal Street in New York City.

                We are not “travelers” as we call the tourists who hit the coast for the weekend, or a long weekend when the rental agencies offer a free night, as we did for over two decades, desperate to own a part of the sea with our eyes and our feet. This time of year is when that longing is satisfied anew, when we do not wend our way around crowds of dogs and families and couples drifting in and out of shops, holding hands. Mid-week the town is shuttered, each food purveyor taking turns being open in a string of four to five days, as if by some unspoken agreement. Only the grocery store’s porch light gleams from early morning until 9pm at night, an island of its own, overflowing with wine, Wanda’s treats and locally sourced vegetables and seafood.

                At the coffee shop, the barista smiles behind her mask and asks Joe if he would like “the usual” and Joe nods but adds a bacon-cheese scone from the basket on the counter.

                “Need to maintain my girlish figure,” Joe comments rosily, patting his lean stomach. Most of the locals are both hearty and fit, with a frost of grey over a variety of hair colors, all curling and blowing westward, or tucked up under a warm cap. Well-worn jeans or cotton jersey skirts and pants, topped with flannel shirts and wool sweaters, parkas, gloves and hiking boots or European leather walking shoes from the women’s clothing store on Laneda finish out the outfit. We can spot the traveler, as they either talk loudly of the cute shop they discovered with embroidered beach pillows and dangly earrings, or the one place open for ice cream during the off season.

                We have grown picky, avoiding the wine bar on Saturdays where folks gather in red Adirondack chairs around gas fire pits coddling glasses of bad wine priced high, nibbling on truffled popcorn and charcuterie. We take side streets when the rush on Laneda is like a high tide and wander by houses we’ve watched taken to the ground, new foundations built, and framing begun. There is an industrious buzz in the air, as here and there crews of builders yell each other’s names and turn their chins up to the sky. The air is laced in a fine mist in February, even as the sun burns strong and bright mid-day, and we walk on the beach, the wind low, caressing our skin.

                Food tastes better here year-round, but especially in the winter, where I can cook in our open kitchen, the gas fireplace running round the clock to keep up, it’s flame in my line of vision, and the fir trees protecting the back deck, through the windows just beyond. Our street becomes a choice thoroughfare for cars in high season, and the bus which runs from Tillamook to Seaside squeals and farts on a regular schedule outside our bedroom window. Now, even its exhaust seems muted, and we sleep weekends past eight. We walk in the middle of the road and when a car comes, it’s almost always a neighbor.

                My dreams are never of the whispering silence, the comfort of the sea, when sleeping here. Instead, I dream of people who are broken, of work anxieties, of missing someone or leaving something somewhere where it can no longer be found. I dream of the girl I once was, and I work hard at knowing the woman I have come. My legs are cold, and I wake up mid-night to shapes and shadows through the windows that surround our bed. I rarely sleep better in our house in Portland, but the dreams vary. There, a darkness descends that has me dreaming in tunnels that I enter, battle through, and emerge from in the morning, accompanied by sweat and the sense I have lost another layer of skin.

                This home, tucked into the back of the golf course, attached to another home where the people only come in the summer months and we never hear, facing a house where when I am at the kitchen sink I observe the father in the family sitting all day at his computer on the kitchen table, this home is a waking dream for me. It has been our lifeline during the pandemic, when we couldn’t stand to breathe the same air of our Portland home, to watch the wildlife cross the backyard, to hear the twang of the mailbox one more time after the postal worker stuffed it with useless retail magazines and mortgage refinancing letters. It is a destination, a hope, where the weather forecast was an alternate universe and the pattern of our days shifted. Where we sit again across from each other at our work desks and run the loud dishwasher only when we leave for a walk. Where the light falls from the windows on to the carpet and my yoga mat in swaths of tenderness.

                This home, this is the center of my gratitude on a Sunday in February, when all around me the winter peels away.