michaelThis is going to be a quiet, literally pedestrian post covering what I see on my daily walk from Aloha, OR to Nike WHQ (World Headquarters) in Beaverton.
The walk to work
The first thing that I see as I step outside is the hoar frost covering everything in sight, from cars to clover.
Most of Aloha and Beaverton are somewhere between rural and suburban, with an occasional spotting of something planned, like this very regularly spaced copse of exceedingly tall trees.
Sidewalks? You don’t need no stinkin’ sidewalks!
I lave the overgrown parts of the walk, where nature just explodes. There’s these brambles; elsewhere I’ve seen wild raspberry bushes. What I expected to see, but haven’t, are mint, which seems to grow everywhere else in the wild, but not here, evidently.
The opposite of the untamed wild is this mid-sized home, surrounded by tall trees, with a well-coifed lawn and an American flag draped by the entrance.
I think my favorite horticultural moment is passing the petals exploding from this bush, more shed every time I pass. There’s something elan vital about the sight.
Nike WHQ campus
This sculpture got moved from the new parking structure to the space near my building. Very cool, and a nice surprise.
My building, known as Rogue (Swift), named after the Nike Swift Suit; designed to have “zoned aerodynamics, a technology that places different fabrics and textures on various body parts, depending on their respective motion and velocity. It also included a hood to further minimize aerodynamic drag.”
The walk back home
This is the Elmonica MAX station, for the local light rail mass transit system.
Most of the homes on my rural walk are old(er), with long-established gardens. That makes this new construction, and brand-new garden plantings, all the more interesting.
Grasses, mounds of grasses.
There’s something about the breeze gently pushing the grasses about that keeps me rooted to the spot for a longer time. So relaxing.
A tall flowering dogwood tree, dwarfed by the even larger firs.
I pass a memorial to a traffic fatality on SW 185th Avenue.
Thanks for coming along on the walk!