I didn’t intend to fall in love with the rain forest. It crept up on me, imperceptibly at first, because the West Coast was never a place I had intended to stay. My roots were nurtured in the farmland, lakes and forests of Ontario before transplantation to the West, an alien habitat of strangely mild temperatures plus rain, rain, and more rain. I anticipated my westward migration as a transient phase. So I kept my emotional distance from this adoptive habitat, or so I thought. But recently, my strong attachment to this lush green place has become impossible to deny.
I spent my childhood in a land of predictable and obvious seasons. Summer was humid, hot, and thunder stormy. Autumn was crinkly, red-leaved and crisp. Winter was snowy and eye-icicly cold. And spring was muddy, rainy, and greenly profuse. So as I adapted to my new surroundings, one of the strangest, most disconcerting experiences was a momentary loss in time. Continue reading
I’ve probably said this before, but I really like maps. In college, I bought a huge collection of used maps at a geography department sale to use as wrapping paper. When we lived in Oregon, we got a gigantic one of the state to put on the living room wall. (We also got an even bigger one of California, which should have been a clue that we might come back.) And there’s a poor cartographer who I keep interviewing without a story in sight, just because his job seems so cool. 
