A friend recently celebrated on Facebook that her young son had accomplished work on the family car. I cut my husband’s hair last night. I will bake bread tomorrow. I am weaving cloth. All these skills and many more—like cleaning my own home and washing my own clothing—can be hired out. Mostly, what I do is what I choose to do, not because I cannot afford to have it done for me but because I value knowing how to do it myself.

Because the tide was high this morning, I “ran inside” which doesn’t mean to me what you are probably thinking.

When the tide is in this time of year waves rush all the way up into the rocks and there’s not sand to run, so I run the local roads. If I run almost a mile north on steep hills, I must turn east and then back north on highway 101. I used to run the half mile to the top of the hill on the highway and then all the way home for a 3-mile run. These days I mostly run 2 miles, so I might run to the cannon display turnout, then head back “inside” to finish off with laps in Kent Price Park. I have been around long enough to remember when realtor Kent Price leveled that land and sold off lots. It is all grown up with weekend housing now. I even designed the west elevation of one of them. Tecktronix has a huge house there. The handsome “butterfly house” is one of the newer ones with an entire wall that folds open to the west. [Maybe they thought they were building a house in California?] The roads I run are narrow and sometimes paved and rarely have any traffic. Not a single car passed me this morning.

After my 2-mile run, I took the newly replaced stainless steel stairs down to the beach. I didn’t see the loose pitbull until it was too late to back off. He charged toward me and I stood still, hands folded high on my chest. I held my breath and hoped. He didn’t bite me or knock me down (that’s happened) but just a light bump and decided I wasn’t interesting so he looked around. At that point the dog’s owner called him and he went away.

I was glad she was able to call her dog. Too many people have no control at all over their loose dogs.

Our own Afghan Hounds rarely responded to being called (it’s not their nature), but then they did’t bump or bite people on the beach. We tried to avoid others. Our Saluki, our last dog Yeti, was bitten twice, first by a visiting Chesapeake Bay Retriever and the next by a neighbor’s dog she often played with. She had bleeding cuts from each incident, but only the Bernese Mountain dog’s bite required stitches. After that, we kept her close and walked over a mile to a secluded cove to let her off lead.

There is a leash law on the beach, but it’s mostly ignored and that is mostly fine. Local dogs all know one another. The woman with the pit this morning said she lived here, but I had never seen her or her dog before, and she didn’t seem to recognize me. She was very annoyed that I didn’t stop to talk to her. It was hard to hear her over the ocean, but she did go on and on. Perhaps she recognized and was offended that I didn’t like her dog. And I get that the term “pit bull” is used to describe many dogs and many breeds, and that people love their dogs and believe that they are unfairly condemned, and they insist it’s not the dog but the owner… I have heard all that, but I also know that I have seen and experienced more aggression from pits than all other dogs put together, even including the untrained Golden Retriever a couple of years ago who threw his 80-pound body against me in play. I know people are often afraid of pits, and I also know people who appreciate their pits’ protectiveness and some people like that others are afraid of their dogs—they have told me as much. And I know that even though my mother’s Corgis had never seen sheep or cows in real life, they tried to herd my children. Humans breed dogs for a behavior; it shouldn’t be surprising when that behavior asserts itself.

I have been asked repeatedly how Portland compares to the coast. I was born in Corvallis, lived in Portland briefly as a little child, lived in Seattle for most of my schooling, and on the Oregon coast in the family home for almost 45 years.

People assume the city feels less safe and noisier. That isn’t entirely true.

In Portland we see a lot of dogs, and they are almost always leashed. We are particularly fond of the Min Pin who lives across the hall and the Corgi on the 2nd floor. We are on friendly terms with Mary the Doberman on the 4th floor and the Greyhound on 3rd. We like dogs, especially leashed dogs. But at the coast, the dogs are almost always loose at the beach. The ocean is never silent and our wealthy neighbors are almost never here but living elsewhere. In Portland, since we live in a quiet building with only downstairs neighbors and one shared wall and five stories up, our home is quiet. We know more of our neighbors and they seem friendlier. We do not get the sunsets since we face east in Portland, but we see the sunrise and the sky is beautiful everywhere. This past Saturday, we walked to a theater and saw a movie for the first time in over four years. (The popcorn was ridiculously overpriced and Gary didn’t like his pizza. We might go back, but the truth is, we’d rather watch films at home.) I like the nearby restaurants and grocery stores and parks. At the beach everything is too far to walk.

I hadn’t meant to write about dogs or distance this morning. I was thinking more about my writing and our work to sort and to disperse possessions. I thought I would blog about goals and running and waiting for literary journals and small presses to reject my work. I was thinking about the glass and agates I find on the shore. But then a dog ran at me and I had other thoughts.