Day 13:

To earn my right to have a bacon maple Voodoo Donut for breakfast, I started the day with a longer than usual run through the woods along the river and under the train trestle.  I'm ever hopeful that a train will come. Because when it materializes from across the river, it's so strikingly dramatic to stand right underneath that mass of power as it passes overhead. It's almost as if it becomes a part of you. Unfortunately, I'm rarely indulged. The best timing I ever had was on my bike when I got to race the train for about a quarter of a mile before it veered off. It was exhilarating. And if nothing else, the engineer and I were both highly entertained.

Today's excitement was provided by the changing woods.  For the first time this year, spring was just asking to be noticed with hopeful buds of pink and yellow on the Oregon grape and new iridescent leaves sprouting out of the undergrowth, beginning to hide the dark cover of last fall's leaves. Even the moss seemed somehow brighter. The woods inspired me to check out the happenings in my yard, and I was pleased to find masses of snowdrops, crocuses starting up here and there, and a few flowers finally popping on my fragrant winter daphne which seems very reluctant to bloom this year. I refuse to think about the weeds I saw.

My favorite garden plants are always from friends because I love thinking about the gardener who shared them with me as I watch them grow.  My snowdrops started as one tiny clump almost 20 years ago, shared by a lovely volunteer at the Portland Opera who hand-wrote thank you letters to our donors. Each week when she came in, we would spend time talking about flowers and gardens. It's a happy memory. And the really fun part of the snowdrop chain is that she received them from a friend who originally dug them from the garden of John McLoughlin, of Hudson's Bay Company fame, also known as the Father of Oregon. 

Now I'm under no illusions that McLoughlin actually planted and cared for these flowers himself -- especially since the house was moved from its original location up onto a bluff in Oregon City in the early 1900s -- but I do love the coincidental connections and intriguing stories about how things come to be under our care, at least for a time.