Photo credit: Marion Ettlinger
Houston has always been on my mind. For nearly 40 years, ever since I fled my city and my neighborhood — not on the lam exactly, but something like on the lam — no matter where I’m traveling, if asked where I’m from I say without thinking, "Texas," even though I’ve lived in Portland for nearly 25 years. Or, if I want to be especially precise, I’ll say, "East Texas," which as any self-respecting East Texan with a tapering southern drawl will tell you is — with our multicultural big city and oil refinery-stained air — distinctly different from the gravelly drawls and long dusty horizons of West Texas popularized by Hollywood. All this time, too, I suppose, it has surprised me that Brays Bayou, the waterway just a few yards from my childhood home on Loch Lomond in southwest Houston, has been creeping inside me. Not flooding exactly, but running slow and low until the rains of retrospection come and the images and stories quickly rise and overflow its banks...