Spoiled Little Utah Girl

The trip to Oregon this time was a little different than most. It had been a year since I had been back to spend any more time than just a short weekend and it no longer felt like home. It was a bitter sweet realization that I was growing up and was no longer dazed by Oregon by its nostalgic home sweet home. I saw it for its beauty as a tourist would. Lovely green every where but slightly annoyed by the rain and glad that I could return somewhere where there wasn't a shoe and sock soaking puddle right outside your car door no matter how hard you tried to avoid it.

And then I thought, what if I'm not really growing up, what if I am just a little spoiled Utah girl? Like the way I proudly told my dad that I had gone outside to get firewood for the stove and he teased me about maybe still having a little country in me way deep down. Not going to lie, I love the convenience of turning a knob for heat that is constant rather than building a fire every morning in the cold and the house doesn't warm up until noon.

And what about how I don't even own a rain coat anymore? If it's raining then I can merely choose to put the grocery shopping off for a day. And if I really can't, it's just a quick jog into dryness since everyone else feels the same way about avoiding grocery shopping in the rain and it's not impossible to find a parking spot relatively close to the store entrance on those wet days.

Or how when I buy a pair of shoes I don't need to think twice about the purchase, taking into consideration how they will hold up on a rainy day. The same with pants. I prefer my pants a little long but back in Oregon I always kept at least one pair that just grazed the top of my shoes because nothing is worse than wet pants from dragging on the ground. The water seeps up the backs of those like a cat prowls bare feet in the morning. You don't realize what's happened until you feel uncomfortable.

I may take for granted that with a newborn I don't even have to care about the pattern of the car seat our little girl is in because she's got a peanut cover to hide her from the world and that cover resembles whether there's a boy or girl inside. I honestly cringed twice when I saw car seats without the handy shell on them, you know, letting all the germs in as the seat swung from the daddy's arm.

Or how about all of the decoupaged (decoupage itself is definitely a Utah word) wood letters and how any well-respecting home has a wreathe on its door to remind the rest of the world which holiday is to be celebrated next? Simple crafts like those are missing in Oregon and I had no idea how much of it originated with all those crafty mommies in Utah until it was not there.

My sweatshirt supply has dwindled considerably because it's either cold enough for a coat around here or warm enough for a t-shirt. Not much middle ground. The sweatshirt in Oregon has a different purpose then it does in Utah, anyhow. In Oregon the sweatshirt is used all day to keep the rain off your arms when it's not chilly enough for a jacket. In Utah sweatshirts are used in the evening when the sun goes down and the temperature drops a few degrees.

Lest we not forget my new-found laziness of saving a few cells of thinking power and not having to worry which bin the recyclables go in and which things can be burned and which are neither and where they go. Utah doesn't recycle the same way Oregon does and when I first moved out here my freshman year of college it drove me crazy. Now I think nothing of it and can toss a tin can in the same sack as a dirty diaper which may also contain some junk mail. It's all the same now.

I told Steven that when we move back to Oregon I would like to move to a dryer part of the state. Somewhere where moss doesn't grow on anything and everything sedentary. Where a yard doesn't seep water when you step on it and where I don't need to worry about making sure Alaska always has a pair of rain boots that fit. However, we do need to be close enough to all of that so that Alaska can watch frog eggs become tadpoles, so she can splash in a puddle of mud wide enough that she can run in, and so she can appreciate a day when she straightens her hair as a teenager and it doesn't frizz.