An Abbynormal Thought..."This looks like Oregon"

I was in the passenger seat as we were driving back from town the other day.  As I was enjoying the scenery a thought popped into my head. This looks like Oregon.  Really?!?!, that thought again!

I have been back living in Oregon going on 7 years now, ever since I became a mail-order bride, aka product of 2 weeks on an online Christian dating site.

The last time I lived in Oregon I was 6 years old living on a small farm with my family in the Pleasant Hill area. I loved it. I spent much of my time hunting frogs in the slough between our place and my cousins place.

This internet photo could have been me.

I also like playing with my pet hen and gathering the chicken eggs or eating strawberries out of our garden and climbing our fruit trees.  But, one of my most favorite things was hanging out at my grandma and grandpa's farm....across the street. She had lots of flower beds, a very large garden, fruit trees, bird houses, chickens, ducks.....and a two story house with wooden stairs (lots of fun to play on)! I would help my grandma weed her flowers, but really I was "kinda" weeding, but mostly hunting for garter snakes.  It was the prefect place to grow up.


But then the summer of my 7th birthday my father took a job in Las Vegas and that is how we ended up in this desert city.  So there we were driving across the desert, without air conditioning in our car in the summer heat. It was so hot our cat was panting! It was so hot that is took more then 2 weeks before the moving company found someone who would drive our furniture and stuff across the desert!
I hated it in the dry lack of much green desert. Plus there were no frogs around and the snakes  were poisnous!
So here started my 40 years in the desert.

Every home that we lived in became a mini Oregon. With lots of flowers and some trees planted. As I grew up and had my own homes this flower-tree planting continued. But then I added ponds.

The first house we bought I added a small pond, which was more like an in ground bird bath within the ever growing flower beds. We also planted lots of trees. Each year we would buy a live Christmas tree to then plant in the yard.

The second home we bought was on a half acre. It already had good size pine trees along two whole sides. (My sister and her husband planted them all, since it had been their place before we bought it from them). I had a cement bird bath about 2' by 2'. Then someone gave my a turtle! Oh....that little bird bath was  not big enough for him. So I dug a pond. It ended up being  around 10-12' long, shallow at one end with a waterfall and then about 2 1/2 feet deep at the other end. In the area around the pond I planted lots of flowers. AND....I found a pond store in town that sold tadpoles! Bullfrog tadpoles! I was so excited to finally have frogs again. At night I would sit out by the pond and watch all the pond life interact. It almost felt like I was in Oregon.

The front yard

The third and last home I bought in Las Vegas had one large tree in the front yard. That was it. The back yard was all grass. So I started planting trees. Around a dozen along the fence line in the backyard. Meanwhile I paid my son to remove the grass from the front yard and I beefed up the sprinkler system and turned the whole yard into one big flower garden!


Then I stared work on back yard again and I had a large 6 sided, 127 square foot bird avairy built in the center of the yard. I had decided a few years back that if I owned birds that they must have a flight cage. There were doves, cockatiels, parakeets and button quail within the aviary. Their sounds were awesome!

   

After the aviary I put in another pond with a waterfall. It was stocked with koi, goldfish, turtles and of course bullfrog tadpoles!

A one year old bull frog

 The place was starting to look like Oregon. Well, kinda.

To add to my weirdness, while on vacation in Northern California I found some moss on a piece of bark. I brought it home and put it in a terrarium. I kept it alive for about a year. Oh how I loved moss, a rareity in the Nevada desert.

Well, time keeps on going. All my kids had grown up and moved out. My job had ended and it was time to sell and move. I figuered I would go visit all the kids spred out in many different states and my mother in Arizona and also my grandma in Oregon. I was thinking that somewhere in my travels I would find a new home.

I never dreamed I would end up back in Oregon. But I did.
I met Daniel on a Christian dating site. 

Acually, he found me, and I was only on for two weeks! He lived in Oregon. I really wasn't trying to get back to Oregon anymore. I had learned to love the desert and all its wonderfull wildlife and rocks. I was leaning towards moving to Arizona.

So after Daniel and I married we bought a farm in the corner of NW Oregon.

The huge maple trees here are covered in moss. The ground is covered in moss. It is so awesome! I have no need for a terrarium to keep moss in. It is everywhere!

There are hundreds of frogs in the "everywhere you look pools of water" singing a chorus at night and you have to love those pretty little Oregon snakes!

There is a spring next to the house and a year round creek close by. No pond building needed. Then every spring and all through the summer the hills on and around our farm go through color changes of pink, purple, yellow, and white flowers! No flower beds to weed or tend to. It so feels like Oregon.


 So here I am driving through beautiful Oregon and still after 7 years my mind says, This looks like Oregon!  Maybe that is because it is Oregon....silly girl!

Well, um, after all this "paradise and moss on earth time" God told us to go. Time is short, He says, we need to be busy with people, not property. So we put the farm up to sell, and now WE have a buyer. We will be leaving Oregon soon, stopping along the way to visit kids and grandkids then headed to training Texas. I wonder how many times I will think, "This looks like Oregon" in Texas?