My parents are from the Willamette Valley! Isn’t 21 kind of cold for your parts?
My family moved to OR in the depression from Eastern Oklahoma (Native American and white mutts). My parents saw the writing on the wall and moved out. Somehow the whole family has ended up back in Oklahoma. My parents just moved to Fort Gibson last month to retire. My mom has so many family members there it was more like a homecoming.
I miss the Willamette Valley, though. When I go there for funerals, it’s like the dang Garden of Eden. I thought the locals were going to call the popo when I went two years ago. I made my cousin pull over so I could pick the wild blackberries growing on the side of the road. You can’t even buy them that nice in Houston.
Yes, this is unusual for us. We’ll see a light snow at some point in the winter, but it usually doesn’t stay around for more than a day.
My sweetie’s mother was raised in a half-dugout in New Mexico. Friends of the family had moved to Oregon & sent back a note saying they’d found the land of milk and honey, & to get out there quick. Which they did.
We have a big bank of blackberry bushes on our property. We pick about 80 lbs each year, which end up in blackberry wine. Yum!