Portland in the third week of April.

They said it was going to be seventy-five and sunny but they’re liars, all of them – it’s gray as far as the sky and raining cold wet rain and it’s soaking through your sweater. It’s been this way for every day you can remember. You can’t even call up what you thought might be different, how the sky could look any other way. This is the part of Portland that makes you cry. Makes you cry at the smallest thing and sometimes nothing. Because you realize it is never, ever going to stop being gray. Every day from here on out, this is the sky that will greet you when you finally pull yourself out of bed, this is your permanent atmosphere.

And you will never fall in love, or if you do it will wreck you, and you will never succeed at your job, or if you do it will be at unreasonable expense, and you will never choose an electrician. Your outlets will always be two-pronged and sparky. The kitchen switch will dangle from the rafters. All is lost.

So you sit up straight and breathe to the bottom of your lungs and focus on the little lettuce and kale starts you pressed into the damp earth only yesterday, how they wilted at the shock of relocation, how they crumpled under assault from the hose. And you know that this is the day that will revive them, this spitty foul rain is the very climate they would each request to live out their lettucey days. And you think of the peas that you pushed in one knuckle deep beneath the climbing trellis, which is really just a stapled length of chicken wire, and of the beet seeds like little comets, and the radish and carrot seeds nearly too small to count out. This rain, right now, is floating them into some sweet little crevice inside the compost you’ve been tending since autumn. It is wetting their dull shells and inciting aspirations of red and orange sugar.

It is hard to remember.