tightly structured yet approachable

In college, Laura's dad told us that if we ever didn't know what to say about a wine, we should call it "tightly structured, yet approachable." I like this phrase and have even used it from time to time. This is relevant because today, Colleen, Amanda, Eric, and I went to visit Laura at her parents' vineyard for Memorial Day wine-tasting. This is what the vineyard looks like.

As you can see, it was also amazingly sunny, for the first time since I've been home.

Without going into copious details, it was a lovely day. Wine at Yamhill Valley, then at Bella Vida, cheese, strawberries, brownies, friends. Turkey vultures. We brought Pascal!

The end of wine-tasting brought us back to Colleen and Laura's new apartment, eventually, where Zac met us for dinner. It was wholly wonderful, all around. The entire day, however, I kept thinking about how much I wish my east coast friends could meet my west coast friends. This is part of the problem with leading several overlapping lives. You meet all these people and you talk about half of them to the other half and vice versa. The stories are funny, but you really wish that there weren't 3,000 miles between the people who made these stories possible.

The easy solution to this predicament comes from traveling friends. Amanda and Kristen each came to New Haven and now they know many, if not most of the people I am close with from FES. A few wonderful east-coasters will come west throughout the course of the summer and I couldn't be more excited to show them around my Oregon life.

Because the best part of wine-tasting, strawberry eating, and going out to dinner was knowing that today was only the beginning of three and half months here. Days at the zoo, Tuesday frisbee, Wednesday staff bonding, weekend trips to Bend and the beach. And with smatterings of visitors all the way through, I continue to have a very good feeling about this summer.

So maybe that phrase has applicability beyond wine. Having groups of people in your life that represent different places and adventures creates a network of people that intersect and diverge, a network that is both approachable, constantly inviting and including new people in new capacities, and tightly bound, structured in such a way to allow for adaptation.

Or maybe I'm just over-analyzing (again) something that's not meant to be analyzed at all.  Hard to tell, really.