Monday, May 6th - Westmoreland to Crystal Springs

My old stomping grounds! We started this week's walk in “downtown” Westmoreland, which is about six blocks from the house I grew up in. I love this area, mostly because it's full of memories. Milkshakes at the soda parlor at Rexall drugs (now a Zoomcare), paper dolls at the Coronet five-and-dime (now the Stars antique mall), watching 'Grease' for the first time at the Moreland theater (still the Moreland theater – I wonder if they still have the scratchy old loveseats with the springs poking out?). They used to have a Make It Moreland Day parade every summer, and we'd scramble to pick up candy and Stan Wiley Realtor buttons thrown from the floats. It was a great place to grow up.

We headed down Bybee, past Westmoreland Park where they used to hold the milk carton boat races every June and over the culvert that we used to inner tube through with my cousins (my mom is looking down right now disapprovingly – we never did tell her that we used to cross Bybee with our inner tubes so that we could float back under it). We crossed over McLoughlin Blvd into Eastmoreland, and followed SE 28th Avenue past the golf course to the Crystal Springs Rhododendron Garden. The garden, which was free when I was a kid, now charges $4 admission so we bypassed it and walked through the Reed College campus instead.

Reed is a small liberal arts college that takes great pride in its academic rigor and free thinking attitude. It's also really, really pretty, with beautiful old brick buildings, huge oak and pine trees and a wide, sunny lawn. We took the path halfway around Reed Lake and past the dorms, which are decorated with window chalked art and philosophical quotations and give a sense that while this is a very intellectual college, it's also a lot of fun. We walked across campus back to 28th Ave and retraced our steps back to Westmoreland.

This is one of my favorite walks since we started last fall. Not because it was especially interesting but because I used to walk there with my Mom and Dad. We have at least one more Westmoreland walk in the book, but we might have to wait a while to give Katje time to recover from my unrelenting “we used to...” and “when I was a kid we...”. In the meantime, I may have to take my kids over to that side of town and bore them with my stories. I'll also have to walk them from Llewellyn Elementary to my old house, and from there to Sellwood Middle School so that they can marvel about how far I used to walk. By myself. Without a cell phone to call home in case of an emergency. Ah, the good old days.