Maybe you saw it too: three old sequoias on SE 44th and Hawthorne, shamefully naked, shorn of their branches in advance of their felling. At the tip of one, some hero had affixed a sign. It read, “RUN FOREST RUN.” The sign was gone next time I walked by; so were the trees.
This dismal scene would be right at home in The Folly of Loving Life, Monica Drake’s new collection of interconnected stories. Drake, a Portland author and Mercury alum, mines the collective anxieties of a burgeoning city where development stalks the streets like a nocturnal predator.
At the book’s outset, the primary protagonists, sisters Vanessa and Lu, are taken by their parents from the city to an overgrown farmstead outside Sandy. Mom has dreams of an Eden-like utopia for her daughters here, “where the world was unpaved and luxurious, half-wild,” but her slipping sanity will leave the girls mostly parentless. And the promise is broken from the start: Their “Arboretum” is bordered by car lots and pet stores, “surrounded by surveyor’s stakes with fluttering ribbons bright and ugly as crime scene tape.”