How I Knew I Wasn't in Oregon Any More

      Songbirds? Now? It's October! 

      Yes, it was the first week of October, but it was also not Oregon. In Oregon, all the songbirds have long since flown south. Last week I was in the South they might have flown to, but hearing them sing in October was still an oxymoronic experience. It wasn't the way things are supposed to be, to my half-century-determined Oregon sensibilities.

      Birdsong wasn't the only oxymoronic experience I had in Birmingham, where I had come for a family wedding. On the same walk, through a neighborhood in Birmingham, I saw trees and bushes in bloom. How could one tree be pink with blossoms while just up the street another tree was just turning pink in its foliage? Isn't it supposed to be that nature colors its trees with blossoms in spring, with foliage in autumn, as it does in Oregon? What kind of place was this that mixed up spring and autumn in such a way?

      During the hours before the wedding, my family (sisters, brother, in-laws, nieces) and I walked through Birmingham's botanical gardens. The tropical greenhouse was like any tropical greenhouse in any botanical garden, never the way things are supposed to grow in that particular climate, but the walk through the woods took me back so thoroughly to the woods of my childhood that I felt like long-leaf pines, swamp magnolias, and pawpaws

This is me in a swamp magnolia tree.

were as much the way woods are supposed to be as the sugar pines, Jeffrey pines, Ponderosa pines, madrone trees, and Douglas firs of my own woods. 

      The wedding itself was the way it was supposed to be, West Coast or East Coast, with a bride beautiful in white and the groom ecstatically happy. Watching the late afternoon sun break through the clouds and highlight the bride just as she walked down the aisle between the rows of chairs set on the long sloping lawn above the river was certainly the way weddings should be, in Alabama or in Oregon, and even the smattering of rain before the ceremony wasn't any more unusual in an Alabama October than in an Oregon October. It didn't last long enough to affect the ceremony, but it was enough to send the violinist scurrying under the cover of the porch roof and to wet the seats of our chairs, which the men in my party gallantly wiped dry with their handkerchiefs. They would have done the same in Oregon.

      The suddenness of being now in Oregon and then, in only a few hours, in Alabama or Georgia – and then, a week later, doing the same in reverse – emphasized these oxymoron. Jet lag is the indication that, according to our bodies, that's not the way things are supposed to be.