The bushes outside the window are busy, occasionally frantic with this wild wind that's plaguing us– like some kind of virus or itch...

This was the kind of weather that became a well-worn vaudeville backdrop for my private histrionics, my rehearsals for confrontations that never came... Now the only thing left is the rain, the sheen on the streets, the eternal hiss of traffic–

Even the one-storey shotgun cottage on 6th Street is gone, replaced by a flat-featured townhouse... Like most American homes, it was a container hopelessly inadequate for the dreams and nightmares it was expected to contain– but it did its level best as we all did, endured as we all did.

6th Street was my street for a long, long time... An epoch in its span and its changes– invisible in their transition, sudden in their accomplished fact... Now I can examine the layers, if I care to...

You turned left from the front walk and left again on C, then followed the street past Mr. Kaufman's at 666, past the electrolysis center with the big dogs in their chain-link run, and finally to the water tower, huge and pale green behind its screen of firs. It guarded a nightmare octopus of an intersection, where C, 10th, Bayberry, Iron Mountain and Country Club all came together...

You crossed behind the cars on C, then Bayberry, then down behind the traffic island of bushes and pines that marked the entrance to Red Fox Hills; then stepped over the curb and onto the sidewalk on the north side of Country Club, with its sharp gravel and four lanes of busy traffic between Lake Oswego and Lake Grove, I-5 and 217... As you headed west you climbed a spur that connected the lowlands of First Addition and downtown to the foot of Mt. Sylvania and its winding complex of tan and grey condos...

On your left was the hurrying traffic; on your right, to the north, formidable laurel hedges and arcing tangles of blackberries, for all their dreadful scale and thorns powerless to shut out the traffic. You felt sympathy for the long-suffering homes they protected. At some point the hedges opened on curb cuts and a traffic island of river rock and manicured pines... Beyond, a low, sprawling tan church that belonged to the Christian Scientists...

After a final stand of laurel you reached a great berm of grass crowned by a fence: the east field. This was for powder puff and soccer. You crossed Hazel at a light to turn right and walk up another hill to the front entrance of the high school, the better to see the football field on your left, and behind it Laker Joe, an immense plywood idol with the outline of a pear, his apex a drooping sou'wester and flowing white moustache. Next to him was the legend "LAKERS" in towering white letters.

If you cared to, if you walked up to the great curve of the bus siding, you could smell the sweet, overused smell of the cafeteria away to your right, and closer, dead ahead, the imperious smells of the main activity: paper, toner ink, floor wax. And if it was a school day, and you were sixteen, an undercurrent of B.O. and anxiety grading sometimes to panic.