Reflections on the Move: Week 1

It is a different view than I am  used to.  The thick forests of fir and cedar trees sweeping down to sandstone cliffs and the gnarled madronna trees perched on the ledges, taking on the wind and the rain and the surf spray and watching over the ragged coast of Bellingham Bay has given way to rolling hills of grain.

The thick wheat fields are scattered with old farmhouses and grain elevator stand like lighthouses standing sentry.  Tractors are parked in seemingly random fashion, left where the days work ends so tomorrow can pick up where it left off.  Some are new, some are old, some are parked in machine boneyards and left to rust under the heavy sun and long summer days that will, in time, become the long season of short winter days and they will alternately be covered with rain and ice and sometimes snow but never snow for very long.

The cackling of eagles and the cry of seagulls has been replaced by the harsh caw of unseen pheasants from the weeds and the edges of the wheat fields and the delicate coo of mourning doves is a near constant sound, wether I am near the fields of sitting in the shade of the ancient maple tree in the back yard.

Right now the wheat fields are highlighted with green giving way, day by day, to the harvest ready gold color.  In a matter of weeks the combines will cut across the fields and mow down the wheat, chaffing the grain from the heavy heads as they go, filling their hoppers with grain and dumping it into trucks or trailers pulled by tractors and they will run in a constant pattern of cutting and emptying without stopping.  But for now, it is peaceful with only the birds and the wind to keep me company in the quiet moments of the morning before I fire up the air compressor and enter into work.

As my thoughts look back to Bellingham, it is with a sorrowful heart at the community -- friends, places, memories -- we left behind but Bellingham no longer has "home" attached to my memory tag, but I can't say that Pendleton does either.  Home, I am learning, has as much to do with where my wife and children are as much as it does with a physical place.

I have the sense of returning but not of having arrived.  Pendleton, I do not think (but I have been wrong before), is not our final destination, I feel that through and through.  But we are in the right place at the right time and I am quite certain we are on the right track.