No columns? It's been raining ice
RACHEL PEARSON

Rachel Pearson of Port Aransas is a graduate of The University of Texas at Austin. She lives in Portland, Ore. She may be reached via e-mail at rachelmpearson@gmail. com.

My dear Texans, I would like you all to know that it's still raining ice most days of the week here in Portland, Oregon. There may be no better way to explain my long hiatus from writing this column than that: It has been raining ice.

It has been a long winter. There were two weeks in which the sun came out and the cherry trees blossomed, and I said to myself, "Rachel, the world is a beautiful place full of things that are also beautiful!" but then it went back to raining ice.

To cheer myself up, I read an article in the New York Times about a woman from the Northern-most city in Norway, where it's dark for several months every year.

But the woman was nothing like me. She said she always mourned the end of the dark months, because they were a time of creativity, when she would write long letters, and curl up with tea, and play hand-clapping games with caribou in the pitch black darkness, etc. She made it sound nice.

To be fair, I did imagine, when I moved to Portland and set myself up for this long winter, something similar. Specifically, I imagined myself holed up in a nice coffee shop most of the time, studying organic chemistry- I'll explain that- while rugged but-gentle mountain men played songs with my name in them on the acoustic guitar.

That never happened.

I did study organic chemistry (hold on, I'll explain), but that was it. When I would go into a coffee shop and open my organic chemistry book, any mountain men who were present would take their boots and axes and attractive medium-sized dogs of indeterminate breed to another table. It was a long winter, and it's still happening.

I did other things to cheer myself up: I bought a hot pink bike helmet my neighbors can spot from a mile away.

I cooked a hundred pots of soup.

I scraped bits of Rachel off various parts of myself and looked at them under the microscope in my biology lab.

I read about the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which bucked and collapsed into the Tacoma Narrows in 1940, and I thought, "There but for the grace."

One thing that helped was talking to my friend Greg, who is quite a bit older than me- maybe he's 60? I hate to speculate- and is a writer himself. He always reminds me that the 20s, which one is compelled to imagine as this time of dancing and looking great all the time in your open-topped car with your 16 closest friends, are not actually like that.

The truth is that all your friends move to huge unknowable cities, and nobody can afford to visit, and your job is lame, and you cycle again and again through goodbyes that are like break-ups, and break-ups that are like divorces. And it's raining ice.

Good thing I've had organic chemistry to think about. See, I'm applying to medical school.

I won't know if I get in or not for another year, so please let's not jinx it, but it's the most exciting thing I can think about doing with my next few years. So, wish me luck.

If I do get in, I promise to write hundreds of fascinating columns about bacteria and malaria and what it will feel like to become a doctor. (I imagine it will feel pretty great.)