The trip here, to this bedroom, to this house on Mount Avenue with the chain-link fence and the mean dog across the street, had started three days before, when Tom and I flew from London to Seattle. My brother’s graduation from college and ROTC would take only a couple of days, so we planned to bookend the celebration in Missoula with a roadtrip through the Northwest. From SEA-TAC, we drove straight to Portland, where we ordered granola and hashbrown breakfasts in the Alberta Arts District, and fell into imaginings of a life in one of those pastel-painted bungalows whose rose gardens verge on summer bloom. We wandered the block-long stretch of Powell’s Books and lost each other in the green, purple and yellow sections until we reunited with Julius Caesar in Literature; the Blue room. (via (un)tidying domestic bliss 4: hanging on illusions | THE STATE)