CrispyPastas

  I moved to Green Hills to watch my sister’s place. It was a little condo, one-bedroom but bright and roomy. I needed somewhere to go after everything with Ron imploded and she needed someone to watch the place while she travelled. win-win. I just had to cover utilities and keep an eye on her houseplants.  By “keep an eye,” it was very clear that that was all I should ever do without consulting her. Leda was a botanist and in her spare time she was trying to create new strains and hybrids of lithops. She knew every bump on her plants and once over drinks she told me she bought her place specifically because it had a large south-facing bay window for the plants to get natural light. (I brought it up later, when we were sober; she asked me never to tell anyone. “Everyone already thinks I’m weird… just bring up the original flooring if Mom or Dad asks.”) I didn’t see the appeal of her plants. They were small lumps, evolved to look like stones in extreme desert environments. Each...

There are no cardinal directions in the cities of the southern Piedmont.  The hills vehemently resist straight lines, forcing roads to meander like rivers.  You could turn at the Waffle House onto a street heading south – five Publixes later, you’ll find yourself at a Waffle House northwest of where you started.   Most development is private, self-contained subdivisions with roads that wind into cul de sacs.  Instead of an orderly grid, maps resemble a watershed of little tributaries curling off from larger waterways arcing off from even larger ones.  A less charitable person might say they look like scribbles by a manic toddler.   If this weren’t disorienting enough, the hills tightly ration the views, revealing only tiny fractions of the landscape as you move through it.  There are no expansive vistas of the strip malls that lay ahead; only myopic glimpses of the strip malls you’re currently passing.  There are no notable geographic fe...

  “I need to pee,” was the first thing I’d said in nearly an hour. I kept staring out the passenger window at the north ridge of the Columbia Gorge looming above the river.  It was starting to drizzle again. “There’s nowhere to stop until we get to Troutdale.” “OK.”  I didn’t want to hold it for another hour, but there was nothing else I could really say.   We were on our way back from a long hike.  It was supposed to be a solo hike, but my boyfriend had insisted on coming.  So instead of the peaceful outing I’d imagined, I got to watch him almost slip and fall for two hours uphill and 90 minutes back down.  I should’ve warned him it was going to be muddy.  He got increasingly huffy as the hike went on, but I stopped myself from reminding him that he didn’t have to come.  Right before we got back to the car, he finally slipped and landed on his ass.  That’s when I reminded him.  We hadn’t spoken since.   I watched an ...